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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   23883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Another day, another Guardian hit job.

The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"

Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?

Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.

I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)

Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.

They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!

Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.

Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.

Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.

Razib Khan is a journalist scientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.

I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.

Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.

Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.

In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.

Edit: fixed Khan's profession.

That list of people seems pretty based. I must admit, I don't understand the Guardians argument here. Does Lightcone have to pay back the money because they invited bad people or because the money was sent fraudulently? If it's the former: lol, if it's the latter: Why even talk about the bad people for 90% of the article? I mean, imagine they were a pro social justice foundation or whatever. Would this mean that they shouldn't pay back the fraud money?

Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.

Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.

One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.

The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:

Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!

Huh? His name is mentioned once, in passing. There's no mention of either incels or feminists in the entire article.

I meant "from the article linked by the Guardian article".

The Guardian:

misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson

(Their link.)

I'm not sure what to make of this hostility towards the article. What about it is wrong, exactly?

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences. Even if you always imagined yourself an enlightened rationalist far above the boorish outcasts that, unlike you, must have reached these very same racist conclusions through some dark age anti-rationalist sorcery.

Though I doubt this will lead anywhere, as this sort of reporting is usually just about petty politics and interpersonal relations between the uncool kids from school, I wouldn't mind it actually doing some damage. Why should this group of smarts be exempt from the contempt of mainstream society? They have certainly proven themselves to being no better morally.

It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest. By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things? Like, does it need spelling out to these big brained luminaries of ours? You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology. It doesn't matter how nuanced and detailed your blogpost is. Some wordcel is just going to copy paste your conclusion and now you're no better than the evil racists you spent 15 paragraphs trying to distance yourself from. And you know what? The wordcel is right! You did reach the same conclusion, after all.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.

This is... true in a black-pilled way, but the way you've stated it sounds like you're defending the ruling class's morals as correct. The whole point is that the rationalists are starting from reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence and reaching different conclusions than the ruling class. The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles. All of these apply to various extents. I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want. It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds, and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.

The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles.

So what? They're still the ruling class despite this, which means they get to make the rules, not the rationalists. Having "reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence" on your side matters little compared to having power on your side.

I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want.

Yes, and so what? The lords are the lords — and the peasants are the peasants — all the same.

It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds

Sure, but don't expect to escape the consequences of criticizing those who rule you, valid criticism or not. In the real world, the kid pointing out the emperor is naked doesn't get the crowd all agreeing with him, he gets executed (probably along with his parents) for lèse-majesté and treason, and everyone else doubles down on praising the beauty and refinement of His Majesty's raiment.

and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.

You can think it unjust all you want, but it's what the powerful think is "just" that matters.

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic. [...]

It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest.

Does the rationalist sphere and ideologically pure normies share the same definition of racism and misogyny though?

You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology.

Did either Khan or Hsu make a statement to that effect? Note that this is different from stating that there is a racial IQ difference but hedging for individual differences.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.

I would argue that the process through which conclusions are reached generally matters.

If policeman A looks at a suspect, sees that he is white, well-dressed and looks innocent, and policeman B talks to the suspect and verifies that his alibi checks out, they may both conclude that their suspect is innocent, but the path which they took would matter to me.

I would consider writing a long, carefully reasoned article to be equivalent to our rule "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."

If Darwin had just drunkenly jelled "Have you seen that hairy little man? I bet his ancestors were monkeys!" instead carefully curating his evidence for years before publishing The Origin of Species, the world would rightfully have judged him differently.

If we censure utterances like "all cunts are stupid", does this mean we should also proactively bar any research into any effect of sex hormones on intelligence? Should we try ethicists discussing the trolley problem for incitement to homicide?

There is a brand of utilitarianism called two-level utilitarianism. The idea is that you mostly follow well established heuristic rules for moral decisions -- perhaps even in system one. If a kid runs in front of your car, you don't calculate the odds of them being the next Hitler given the neighborhood you are in, you just hit the brakes. But under certain circumstances (like when speaking to a murderer asking you if you have seen his prospective victims) the usually good heuristic rules (like "don't lie") might cede to a more situational consequentialist analysis.

Likewise, I would propose a two-level handling system of utterances of opinions adjacent to verboten topics. Most utterances are low effort shitposts / tweets which can safely be dismissed out of hand. If someone posts "teh gayz should kill themselfs!!!1" it is valid to conclude that the poster is not contributing a method to fight demographic changes but just a bigot asshole.

Of course, every ugly sentiment can be padded with motivated reasoning and inflated into a scholarly-sounding article "voluntary suicide of non-reproducing individuals as a collective means of affect population dynamics" or whatever. There is probably someone out on the internet arguing lengthy that Nazi race "science" was 100% correct.

This is a pill I am willing to swallow as the alternative is to declare whole areas of research as verboten. Some Nazi rambling for tens of pages on skull forms or whatever will likely be memetically much less successful than someone who posts racist meme images. And in the odd case where the pre-decided societal consensus is actually factually false (it has happened once or twice in history!) we do not shoot the messenger.

In the words of Scott himself:

The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same.

Here is a Twitter thread listing some of the factual inaccuracies. https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280

Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

Hsu claims no knowledge of cognitive differences between races caused by genetics. Has he said something different elsewhere? https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-controversial-views.html

https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280

Now here is actually something I can disagree with Oliver about: the choice of medium.

I am not even asking that people use fully open standards implemented by free software personally blessed by Richard Stallman running on open-design hardware they personally control, but twitter does not even allow the reading of a thread without being logged in (so that people don't train their LLMs with all that sweet high quality content without cutting Musk in). Nitter was the useful way to read it, but that is gone. x.com feels like it eats as much RAM as an 1000 reply OT on ACX before substack got their shit together (kinda) for showing me a measly four lines text and a single reply.

To use Hsu's own words in a different context:

As a physicist I am used to a high level of scientific rigor. Statistical certainty of 99.9% is not sufficient, in our field, to claim a discovery (e.g., a new elementary particle). Thus, the correct answer to many questions (e.g., do electrons have substructure? Are black people innately stupid? Did the holocaust happen?) is: I do not know.

Sorry, Hsu, but claiming a neutral position on certain topics doesn't cut it.

Maybe as I grow older I also grow more stupid but I feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable. Claiming that your interest is purely scientific or whatever isn't good enough. Because the wrong discoveries can do a lot of damage. You need to meet the moral/ideological/philosophical underpinnings of the progressive worldview head on. Otherwise you have no relevant objection to them crushing you when you go too far astray.

I don't understand what your point is and want to clarify that the video part of your quote is made up and not the kinds of questions he is referring to.

Are you accusing Hsu of having an interest in HBD? If so, based on what?

I don't understand what your point is and want to clarify that the video part of your quote is made up

I had hoped that it was obvious to everyone that the part in bold was added by me. Though that may be an error as I just assumed people would read the link given to Hsu's blog. People are obviously more quick to comment than that, sadly.

and not the kinds of questions he is referring to.

It's exactly the kind of question he is referring to. A different example of his, given in an interview were he was asked about his views and the characterization as being racist he says, paraphrased:

so I've been attacked because... I'm not willing to categorically rule something out, I'm suddenly a racist. Which I think is absurd, I think for many question like... Is there a god? You might admit is even a more important question and I'd say the jury is out and I don't think I should be labeled as a bad person for that.

The point I'm making is that being open to everything obviously isn't allowed. You can't be agnostic on sacred matters and Hsu knows this. In my view he's just trying to weasel his way out since he's too proud to outright lie like Turkheimer or that he knows how ridiculous die hard environmentalism is.

Are you accusing Hsu of having an interest in HBD? If so, based on what?

Just casually scrolling through his blog. He did a fun interview with Razib Khan where they go over some of their shared interests together, population genetics included... I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career.

What reason is there to think he is unsure that the Holocaust happened?

Population genetics is not HBD. That is not what is getting him called racist.

You're not getting the point, which is that there are certain things you are not allowed to be uncertain about. Claiming that you're a physicist and that you hold to some uncertainty principles isn't an excuse for the true sacred cows. To exemplify this I took a quote from Hsu and applied it to the holocaust.

Population genetics is not HBD. That is not what is getting him called racist.

"Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations"

As I already said, and wish you would have read: "I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career."

You're playing definition games here. Hsu himself says that there are people calling him racist. He does research into intelligence and has no problem with things like IQ. He has interest in population genetics and doesn't rule out a hereditarian perspective. Long story short, he's on a lot of thin ice. He's basically everything an HBD person would be if they were trying to hold down a job at a university. Now, is he? I don't know or care. It's irrelevant to the fact that he is doing too many suspect things. Which is why he is a good target for our fine folks in urbanite journalism.

As an aside: I'd appreciate if you stated your intentions here. I don't care to write every point twice. I also don't care to meet your personal definition for words after I explicitly state that there's an obvious issue with definitions of words going on.

Who uses that definition of HBD? HBD refers to socially relevant differences. Population genetics is based on possibly inconsequential differences that are nearly universally accepted. HBD doesn't even refer to differences in skin colour which are totally uncontroversial. Even if you want to define HBD this way, how is that relevant? No one is calling him racist because he's interested in population genetics.

I get your point. I'm just criticizing other things you've said.

More comments

feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable.

This article sucks. As a congenital leftist who doesn't like racism per se but has been convinced as to the validity of HBD, I was expecting something worth reading rather than "These beliefs are offensive because... you know, they just are, there's no point examining this further." This article isn't an attempt at explaining why race science is objectionable, it just assumes that it is and then proceeds from there. Yes, I know that answering these questions might make some people feel bad. That's not actually a reason to continually lie about it and engage in efforts at restorative justice that are doomed to fail because they're based on motivated thinking rather than a look at the evidence. If my car is refusing to start, should I simply ignore the fuel gauge showing empty because I don't want to believe that I'm out of gas and spend tons of money taking my car to mechanics to figure out the problem?

If the question of African IQ is a matter of empirical science, exactly what piece of evidence are we waiting for? What would finally convince the racialists that they are wrong?

There's actually a lot of evidence that could settle this! The problem isn't that no scientific evidence proving Tabula Rasa is accepted, but that every single time you actually do the experiment you end up with evidence proving the opposite or a paper that doesn't replicate. What even is the point of raising this as a hypothetical when in other places in the article he flat out admits that his own side should ignore evidence in favour of ethical concerns? He's also destroyed his own ability to prevent that evidence - why exactly should I trust an article written by someone who says that on this particular topic it is a moral imperative to lie if the facts don't match up to his ideology?

Watson is a legitimately respected and famous person on the basis of his great scientific accomplishments and the awards they have won for him, but those accomplishments don’t have very much to do with racial differences in intelligence, except that both domains involve the concept of “genes” in a very general way. It is safe to say that he does not know anything more about the subject than anyone writing here.

No, it isn't fucking safe to say that! Watson would absolutely know more about genetics and evolution than Eric Turkheimer, or me, or most of the people on the motte. Hell, I will flat out say that I know more about genetics than Turkheimer despite his years of study, because in this article he doesn't even seem to know how genes work (see his section on how the legacy of slavery is why African americans do worse on IQ tests). Of course, I think there's a decent chance that he is aware and is simply lying about it - after all, the position he takes is that this is a matter of morality rather than evidence, so it doesn't matter what the facts say.

While I think there is an argument to be made with regard to the harmful effects of promulgating HBD/race science among the general public, I don't think the Turkheimer article makes a particularly good case for it. To extract the relevant points:

They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings.

...

...it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

The issue is that the intuitions and ethical principles he describes are not universal. One is perfectly capable of believing that the moral qualities and cultural accomplishments of human beings are tied to genes, and such a belief wouldn't prevent such a person from celebrating such accomplishments any more than it prevents me from appreciating the beauty of a flower simply because said beauty was genetically determined.

But I suppose I am simply restating your point about meeting the philosophical underpinnings of your opponent's worldview head on, with which I agree.

Maybe as I grow older I also grow more stupid but I feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable.

I think a fair summary of this article is “it’s offensive”, which is not an argument I find compelling. Am I missing something here?

I'm not posting it to convince people of Turkheimers viewpoint, I'm posting it to demonstrate at what level the debate is being had. It doesn't matter what the science says. Race science is ugly and offensive. This is a fact and anyone who disagrees can be invited to explain the hereditarian viewpoint to a kind and caring black person without feeling gross.

Or to put it another way: We object to it on the same grounds we object to excavations of alleged mass graves from Nazi death camps: The holocaust happened, there's no reason to desecrate graves of its victims. The end!

If you want to argue in favor of science and knowledge... Why here, why now? What drives ones interest towards race or the holocaust? There is no answer here. You're just a racist nazi.

If there's a genuine position that can meet progressive ontology head on I'm willing to hear it. So far the only competitors I've seen are racists or people who either willfully or ignorantly ignore the glaring issues that lie between blacks and whites.

If you want to argue in favor of science and knowledge... Why here, why now?

I don't know how many more times this can be repeated, I'm sure everyone with your position who posts here has had this explained but then you go on to ask these questions again so I will explain to you again. The reason it matters to many of us is because White people in America and the world broadly are being accused of a grievous crime of holding entire races of people down. Of perpetrating massive and distributed systems of racial discrimination. The proof is the outcomes from claimed to be meritocratic processes being unequal along racial lines. Everywhere that explicit racism can be found has been rooted out by ever more hysterical people who have gotten to the point of calling the idea of meritocracy itself to be racist.

This calls out for a search for an alternate explanation. And there are some pretty obvious places to check.

If not HBD and our attempts at rooting out explicit discrimination what's the progressive's actual endgame? Permanent and continuous transfers along racial lines with the agreed understanding that white people are just incapable of not discriminating against black people? You think that's a stable solution?

I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people. According to the progressive oppression stack white people rest pretty low. That's where your problem with the progressives begins.

If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?

I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people.

What a trick this is! Ask why someone might be motivated to seek knowledge "why here, why now?" to imply racial hatred as motivation and then when some other motivation is reached for you say "See!? I knew no one could just value scientific knowledge!". From how you've constrained the options no path can lead to a genuine motivation.

If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?

Being somewhat username blind it's not clear to me if you're merely trying to demonstrate how tightly hermetically sealed the progressive outlook is or if you find yourself caught in it. But in the interest of trying to unravel this nut either way. I will say I care about avoiding the pitfalls of impugning a people with the blood libel of unfalsifiable racism from the same parable the jews were famously put through and in a way that ought resonate deep in the western psyche. It is enough for me that it is cruel, unfair and a violation of our national aspiration to hold whites culpable for a crime they have not committed. But if I must appeal to the progressive stack, that loathsome concept, then I will say that it did not serve the nazis well to place the blame for all their troubles in the jews, nor did it serve Lysenko well to place the soviets on the other side of genuine scientific inquiry. History is replete with people and peoples who thought they could, this time, let resentment and catharsis take priority over truth and the hatred will not serve you. There is nothing to gain from this willful ignorance and much to lose.

Surely "permanent" is an exaggeration.

I think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.

Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?

My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'

I don't even really think that's the end of the problem most unstable. The gaps will continue to exist among people with the same background so we're really going to go ahead with the belief that in 100 years when progressive thought is no longer fought at all that we're just going to let the obviously discriminatory leaders continue to do their harm?

This is a fact and anyone who disagrees can be invited to explain the hereditarian viewpoint to a kind and caring black person without feeling gross.

Is there bulletproof glass between us?

Ah, I see. In that case I agree that it demonstrates the discussion well.

I’m a bit confused by your last paragraph though. The obvious answer would be to judge individuals on their merit, no? That’s explicitly opposed to progressive race-based judgement, aligns well with classical liberalism and HBD views, and already has a wide acceptance society-wide.

It works up until you need to answer why their literacy rates are so low and why there are practically none of them in higher education.

You can't tell the black people the truth because that's ugly and no one has the stomach for it, so where do you go? The exact same way our modern western society has gone: Towards progressivism. Because progressive ontology actually has a beautiful answer: ordained equality and racism.

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

Nah. Left wing hit-job-writing "journalists" aren't normies. If your standard is "what will ordinary people think" as opposed to "what will the Guardian think", the ideological purity standards are not that high. I know they claim to speak for all decent people, but they really don't.

Yeah, journalists aren't normies. No one said they were. That doesn't change the fact they set the standard for normies. Racism bad. Misogyny bad. Everyone except your racist uncle agrees.

You can't go and talk about race and IQ in public and come to any sort of hereditarian conclusion and not be eligible as a racist. Those are the rules.

You absolutely can though. To the normie mind, "racist" equals "doesn't like (group)". If you talk in a way that doesn't actually imply any dislike of a group, they won't grok you as racist, and won't pay any mind to people who accuse you of racism.

If you talk in a way that implies blacks are innately dumber than some other group you are not getting anywhere. Race and IQ stuff are beyond the pale if you are a hereditarian.

In what universe? I mean maybe in Berkeley, but the normies around me say shit that implies a black intelligence disadvantage all the time, they just don’t use the words ‘blacks are on average one standard deviation lower in IQ than whites’.

We must hang around different types of people.

I would say this is probably true, but normies don’t say things where you can see them like ‘they’re kind of clueless’ when someone’s getting irritated with a black? No complaining about ‘football names’ and ‘shaniqua’ and ‘what did they expect when they decided the government should be daddy’ or snarking about Juneteenth being so close to Father’s Day so everyone could have something to celebrate? No ‘well they’re racist too’? No discussion of how ‘Katrina kids’ dragged down the public schools and they should be more like the Vietnamese or Mexicans?

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The normies think what the journalists tell them to think.

Isnt the whole alleged "crisis of consensus", "political polarization", and "rampant anti-intellectualism" that typifies modern America indicative of the opposite?

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

The pandemic proved otherwise.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

That just marks you as a non-normie. The normies have forgotten who Epstein was, and if you remind them, of course he killed himself, what are you, some sort of paranoid?

I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

If any thing media viewership and trust were already trending downward before 2020 and the pandemic coupled with the George Floyd "summer of love" killed what was left.

We live in a world where (if a quick Bing.com search is to be believed) Joe Rogan's podcast averages more listeners per week than all of CNN.

The George Floyd "summer of love" had middle-aged white people setting up Black Lives Matter rallies in suburban towns. While wearing masks, as they were told by CNN et al. The pandemic and Floyd should have caused a huge drop in media trust; what it did is demonstrated that the power of the media was far greater than most thought.

Again, I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

In person, I've heard a lot of opinions from regular people with normal politics that you would typically only hear from the far-right online. What is considered allowable opinion online, much less the opinions that are typical of young journalists, are not at all typical of most people in the real world.

They really don't. The journalists love to imagine that's the case, but it isn't.

If normies thought what the journalists told them to think, the Voice referendum would have passed with 80-90% of the vote.

Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.

No they don't. Normies think whatever their friends do. That is, frequently, highly skeptical of the media.

I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".

Generalized distrust of media is insufficient if it does not result in skepticism of a given story. It observably did not do so for most people for COVID and BLM, which are the last two serious stress-tests of the thesis. It's really not so different from people having a super-low opinion of congress, yet reliably voting for their incumbent congressperson.

wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic

Using truly the broadest possible interpretation of a dictionary definition, sure. But we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

Um, yes, in this case it very much is - Anomaly used the word himself in the paper Guardian is doing the Body Snatchers scream at, to refer (correctly) to what he was advocating.

More generally, "eugenics" is and has always been a very broad term; the eugenicists of the 19th and 20th centuries would absolutely consider these kinds of schemes eugenic. I agree that there's a lot of rhetorical trickery enabled by the term's breadth, but that breadth is authentic.

If you are out in public airing your view that it's an inherently good thing that smart and beautiful people are having more children then you are a eugenicist. The implications of what you have to think and believe to say such a thing are obvious.

Most people would not think this or perceive the darkly hinted implications. This maximally benign idly wishing beautiful smart would have kids is not the common use understanding of eugenics and the implications are more in your imagination than other people's.

There's a small fringe of progressives actively looking for wrongthink. They denounce all sorts of mainstream views as fascism, racist dogwhistling, etc. This appears to be their hobby. Getting enraged at "bad" people feels good to them. They are a very small portion of the population. I suppose these people would sniff out the wrongthink in this and declare it to be just like the Nazis and [bad thing]-adjacent and wave around a non-common-use understanding of 'eugenics' as one of many disingenuous rhetorical smears.

Whether most people are dumb enough to not understand something or not is irrelevant. The journalist is obviously smart enough to. Doing the maximally benign wrongthink is still wrongthink. The Stasi doesn't owe you any favors to interpret you flirtations with eugenics as anything other than an ultimately hostile act.

Whether they are actively looking for wrongthink or not is irrelevant. You can't do positive flirtations about verboten subjects. Even if you are an old fuddy duddy and think your tweets are benign.

I don't strictly disagree with you. I just don't understand why you are arguing this. Neither one of us makes the rules.

Almost everyone thinks this though. It's just one of those things that people generally agree on but people get uncomfortable if you're too explicit about it.

There are plenty of people who think that beautiful, intelligent people having fewer kids is evidence that they’re ‘responsible’.

And they probably think it's even more responsible for stupid ugly people to have fewer kids.

Well yes, lots of those people will go on to say inmates shouldn’t be released without being sterilized first.

Let's be precise.

The argument that high-IQ women should either get married and start having children as a first step after graduating from college, or avoid going to college altogether and focus on becoming mothers, i.e. that society should incentivize them to do so, I think it's fair to say, counts as borderline dissident among middle-class college-educated normies today. It doesn't count as 100% badthink maybe, but it's close. Ultimately this is the essence of positive eugenics.

Negative eugenics, i.e. the argument that the fertility rate of low-IQ people should be curbed in various ways, on the other hand, is definitely outside the Overton window. Yes, you can argue that liberal policies pertaining to abortion and birth control actually have this effect in the real world, but I doubt they actually reduce the relative fertility rate of low-IQ people as compared to that of high-IQ ones, so there's that.

Also, it's fair to say that, to the extent eugenics is dismissed as deplorable junk science by the Guardian-reading demographic, it is done so because it's interpreted as an outgrowth of White supremacism.

What I don't think is borderline dissident is the idea that smart beautiful women should have at least two kids starting in their mid to late 20s after getting their careers established and finding the right husband or that stupid ugly people should have at most two kids and also wait until they're financially and romantically stable. That is also a positive eugenics position albeit one less extreme and rarely stated explicitly. But I would guess most people agree with it.

White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.

It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.

Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.

There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.

My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.

Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.

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And yet in 2006 Idiocracy presented the ‘stupid people having too many children is destroying this country’ school of liberalism pretty openly. It’s clear that the taboo isn’t really that, it’s more as you say in the last paragraph.

Indeed, but that was a different era, before the Great Awokening. It's also true that feminist websites posted recommendations to women for avoiding getting raped back then. It's no coincidence that liberal critiques of the movie have also appeared.

How many people are actually on board with the Great Awokening though? I don't think it's that popular.

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Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

This is playing definitional games. "Believes there are measurable differences between races" is a fairly new definition. It will almost always, and probably on purpose, be conflated with "believes blacks should be treated detrimentally purely on account of being black."

Even the most ardent of public racists don't even pretend to entertain the notion that people should be treated badly because they are of this or that race.

"Believes there are measurable differences between races" is a fairly new definition.

It's not.

The only game being played here is pretending that there is some relevant distinction to be made between the views of 'rationalist HBDers' and George Lincoln Rockwell on racial differences other than confidence and honesty.

They are not only playing those games. They keep winning them and getting away with it.

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.

I agree strongly. There is a set of views which society generally considers to be cancellable (in the sense that the currently ruling elite does, as does a supermajority of people who are smart enough to have well-formed views on the issue). Steve Hsu, Razib Khan, Robin Hanson and even Scott Siskind all in fact hold some of these views. So "cancel the rationalists" is, by the rules the Grauniad and NYT are playing by, good journalism. The partisan-flipped version of "don't cancel the rationalists" is "It is okay for communists to act in Hollywood", not "The actors on Joe McCarthy's list are not in fact communists".

I am a pro-free-speech liberal, so both "racists should not be cancelled" and "it is okay for communists to act in Hollywood" are bullets I am willing to swallow. But most people aren't.

Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again

Scott is no longer trying to conceal his real name, so you can't doxx him by publishing it any more. If doxxing means anything, it means either

  • Publishing (or signal-boosting obscure but publically-available) contact information in a way which makes it likely your more deranged followers will harass someone.
  • Publicly linking an online pseudonym to a real-world identity which the pseudonymous poster wishes to conceal.

Publicly linking an online pseudonym to a real-world identity which the pseudonymous poster wishes to conceal.

Okay, I may have stretched the word doxxed a bit, but looking on the about page of ACX, it seems to me that Scott Alexander does not prefer for his writing activities to be linked to his last name. Furthermore, that is the name under which he is known, adding his last name will not provide important context for the readers.

Insisting on stating his last name seems at least impolite. Given his history with journalists, I would roughly compare it to deliberately deadnaming a trans person.

If the Guardian had a policy to consistently write using the full civil names of people, as in "after finishing my latest hit piece, I danced to Mrs. Ciccone's music, watched the meeting of Mr. Bergoglio and Mr. Thondup on TV and finally fell asleep reading the biography of my idol Mr. Dzhugashvili" (or something), then a case could be made that they might also want to refer to Our Rightful Caliph by his civil name. But most of the time, they are fine referring to people by their common handle.

By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things?

Was this a deliberate echo of Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons?

I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.

I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.

Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.

I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues.

Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?

Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?

Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.

The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.

The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.

I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.

But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.

Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.

Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.

The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.

Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen.

Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.

The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.

What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict.

Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.

The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as ...

You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".

Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it.

The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs

It sounds like you think this definitional battle is, in fact, worth it?

I'm encouraged that you acknowledged that there are costs - can you elaborate? I think Zac would claim that one serious downstream cost is autogynophiles being encouraged to castrate themselves. To me that is the main problem - confused and unhappy people being encouraged to mess up their bodies unrecoverably. I think that frank acknowledgement of the senses in which, due to the limitations of medical technology, trans people aren't actually their desired gender, would lessen this problem. So I do think that this is a definitional battle worth fighting (as do pro-trans advocates).

It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten

The cis-/trans- prefix is already on the spectrum of verboten. Behold, the parts of woke subculture that insist on spelling transwoman as two words. This is to emphasize the woman-ness of transwomen and de-emphasizes the transness as a mere modifier, like brunette.

Similarly, if you hang around progressives and always refer to cis women as just "women" and always refer to trans women as "trans women" I am pretty sure you'd get a talking to, eventually. I hope nobody is silly enough to say, "Well that's just a couple crazy people on reddit." I know because my real-life woke friends don't actually mention that someone is trans unless it's to mention how fearful they are for their safety somewhere as a victim.

That you suggest to taboo the word "male" (not "man!") shows just how far down the slippery slope these language games have moved us this past decade. At first, progressives merely claimed the word "man," and left "male" around for us to talk about chromosomes. Sure enough in the current year, progressives act like man and male are synonyms again!

I predict that the ever-more-cumbersome phrases we retreat to, like "biological sex," will also get phased out. Make no mistake, the purpose of putting trans and cis into the same mental bucket is to push normative behaviors onto people. Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."

What the sequences actually say about defining a word any way you like is that it is a common misconception

Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."

I am kind of with Scott on this one. Love is the one area where one can discriminate. People are attracted to what they are attracted, which includes presenting gender, what kind of interface the other person has between their legs, skin color, body type, hair color, relative height, dialects, high nobility, potential for offspring, appearance, socioeconomic status, criminal record and anything else under the sun.

And for what it is worth, I don't think that this "either date transgender or be called a bigot" will fly even in the LGBTQWhatever community. If some hairy dude goes into a lesbian bar, declares that he identifies as a woman and challenges some lesbian to take him home or be a bigot, then the queers will not be on the side of the dude.

Have you seen what's happened to lesbians lately? They have absolutely been attacked for "don't ask women to suck your dick at a lesbian bar" policies! The thing you're suggesting would never happen already happened 5 or 6 years ago, and with the full support of the lgbtqxyz++ media!

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I was thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

but that's fair, it might just have been motivated cognition. But given that Scott has independently reached unpopular contrarian opinions on his own so many times, and doesn't address the downsides of gender-defined-by-fiat head on, it's almost the same phenomenon as dishonesty imo.

I think it's definitely motivated cognition in the case of Scott. (But toeing the line for Bostrom.)

Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:

“The greatest joy I get from this kind of reporting is sending such a fine selection of people into a spiral of seething cope on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Don’t want the smoke? Don’t be this kind of person”

Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.

Also has this charming post where, in a reply to Passage Publishing, the "journalist" posted a picture of the Passage Publishing logo upside down, next to a photo of Mussolini hanging upside down after his execution. The message communicated clearly being "Passage Publishing are fascists who should be executed by firing squad."

No idea what they did to earn such a response, but I'd put money on it being boringly inoffensive.

Truly pulitzer-worthy "anthropological curiosity" on display, dedicated to broadening the intellectual horizons of his audience.

"Don't be this kind of person" is really a skeevy way to put it (in my opinion).

He justifies his interference in their activities not because they've impacted him in any way, they've not directed a single iota of attention towards him and thus there's no impetus for 'smoke' in the first place. It's not a rap beef where they dissed his fashion sense or cursed his dead mother and thus justified a response.

But oh, they're the 'kind of person' who invites such scrutiny. Isn't it so handy-dandy that he's the one who gets to describe what 'kind of person' they are and the audience is supposed to just assume that BECAUSE he states this that they are indeed worthy targets of his uninvited ire. And if they disagree with how he characterizes them, that is further proof that they're the 'kind of person' who needed to be called out.

I'd also guess that what he means by "kind of person" is almost literally just "someone who believes things that I find offensive" and so really he has no external reason for it, and he sees this as perfect justification for swinging the hatchet their way.

These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.

But I'm also inclined to inflict the greatest insult an enemy can suffer. To be ignored.

These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.

OK. Let's try to put our "recovering quokka" title to the test and say any response is on the table. Let's also pretend all resources are available to me. What's your solution?

It sounds to me like it's wishful thinking and cope.

First pass?

Just hire some research pros to dig into the background of any journos involved in the piece in question with the explicit goal of discrediting them, embarrassing them, or getting them fired.

Find any embarrassing or potentially criminal behavior they can, find solid evidence or cross reference it enough to prove it, then hire someone to write about it all in the most unkind light manageable. Then find the biggest platform for publication you can, and get ready to publish it.

Give the Journo about 30 minutes to respond to a request for comments before hitting 'publish.'

Kind of like how Christopher Rufo came after University Presidents and managed to get a few of them to resign merely by digging into their past scholarship and running it through a plagiarism detector. If it works on people in such positions of power, it'll work on Journos.

Or if they're too unremarkable and impotent for it to work, then yeah, revert to utterly ignoring them.

Looking at his previous work, he appears to be a left-wing activist calling himself an "investigative journalist", so intellectual curiosity certainly cannot be expected. Kinda bad taste to claim he's just doing it for ragebait rather than the very important work of exposing the far right.

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way. No idea if he still endorses that opinion but it's a majorly sus thing to say.

Hanson likes throwing out interesting ideas. I'd be shocked if he was actually okay with rape.

Hanson throws a lot of crazy ideas out there. I think to have a really high number of good ideas in absolute numbers, you've also got to have a lot of stinkers in absolute numbers, so I don't hold his worst ideas against him as long as he doesn't start constantly shouting about them

It's not misogynistic though.

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way.

No he said being cuckolded as in literally raising someone else's child as your own would be worse. That's worlds apart from an affair that leads to no children.

The whole problem is that Hanson's arguments are usually based on a number of different premises that can't be easily reduced to a single sentence, so by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

And him being autistic as hell means that a 'gentle, silent' rape that inflicts no physical injuries can certainly be compared to other acts in terms of psychological impact and harm, because he doesn't place any special sacredness on the word 'rape' that renders the act inherently more evil than any other act which humans find traumatic and distressing.

by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".

Hanson is almost the definition of a guy who DOES NOT Motte and Bailey his arguments.

I might believe he artfully phrases some of his arguments to avoid explicitly admitting his belief or disbelief in a certain point. I've never seen him fall back from any 'outlandish' arguments he's made to a simpler or stronger one while pretending he's not backing down at all.

Where did he argue for the bailey, and what is it?

Did you read the linked post? He's making the claim that it's a bigger harm in terms of genetic interests.

Can you expand on what you mean by "majorly sus"? Is the idea that the fact that he'd raise a hypothesis that could also be used to argue for taking crimes against women relatively less seriously, that's evidence that he's misoginystic?

I suppose that's a reasonable inference, but I also think he does raise a good question and point to a genuine mystery. More generally, if academics can't raise wrong-sounding ideas without being cancelled, then there's not much point in having them or listening to them. So I guess I implore you to ask if there is any venue or method by which someone could discuss disgusting-sounding ideas that would lead you to actually try evaluating their claims.

Am I the only one who's noticed surprisingly high overlap between describing behavior as "sus" and vague gestures that someone is problematic? Like that entire cluster of person converged on using the same word? That kind of dark hinting has been a primary part of the progressive playbook for awhile, but what's with the word sus?

I first time I heard "sus" was when Among Us went viral. I'm not very good at these social deception games, so of course I was never a fan of playing them. I'm curious, are other average motte spergs similar?

Enjoying those games and applying that lense to everyday social/political interactions seems like the extreme right-tailed distribution version of the oversocialised, status-obsessed sociopath

It's not a good inference because he explicitly states that he isn't trying to argue that rape is less bad.

I agree, but I was trying to be maximally charitable in case all that Folamh3 knew about Hanson was that he was arguing against rape being worse than something else. That's why I was asking if he read the post.

It's not very charitable to Hanson though.

I'm not saying "Hanson said this, therefore he should be cancelled". I'm saying that it's reasonable to characterise that specific belief as misogynistic.

I don't see how that's reasonable. He didn't say anything to diminish the perceived severity of rape. He only made an argument about the severity of cuckoldry.

Okay, but the framing as "sus" makes it sound like a hidden, rare opinion. What do you think of his claims?

why is it misogynistic? Being cheated on is remarkably traumatic for men or women, as evidenced by the evident link to homicide/suicide. The "gentle" and "silent" modifiers are there to disambiguate theories of where the harm is coming from, not to claim that harm doesn't exist.

You know, I'd think that I'd have gotten accustomed to this sort of thing by now, but the specifics are still galling:

In March 2015, the New York Times announced that it had hired Khan on a short-term contract, and that he would write for them about once a month.[12] The Times wrote he is "a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis. He writes about evolution, genetics, religion, politics and philosophy."[12] The same day the Times announced hiring Khan, Gawker published an opinion piece written by J.K Trotter, who noted that Khan also wrote blogs for Taki's Magazine, an online publication "founded in 2007 by Taki Theodoracopulos, the flamboyantly racist Greek."[13] As a result of Khan's history of writing for controversial publications, the Times removed him as a regular periodic contributor, but stated they remain "open to consideration of submissions from him" in the op-Ed pages.[14] The Times did not specifically mention the part of Khan's work they found uncomfortable,[15] and he wrote two op-eds for the paper before they ended his contract.[16]

Never mind that the Times should be fine with having a writer on staff that has written something controversial, the stated reason here for him getting dropped isn't even that he wrote something controversial, it is just literally guilty by association. Is he a badthinker? Oh, most definitely by these standards, but his detractors don't even need to figure out why, because it's enough that he wrote blogs for a site founded by a flamboyantly racist Greek.

Guilt by association can obviously be a bad thing, but is sometimes totally understandable, so I visited the actual website in question: Taki's Magazine. I wanted to know how much was simple guilt by association and how much was more direct. About page:

We at Taki’s Magazine take our politics like we take life—lightly. We believe political labels such as conservative and liberal are as outdated as flared trousers and Nazis. Ideology is a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly to create a paradise on Earth. Our only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by the woke, Hollywood, the mainstream media, and promotors of a new world order. Think of us what you will, but read us. Our writers are never boring.

Main featured story: "How Does Your Garden Grow? Upon the Corpses of Millions" by Steven Tucker. Apparently a rant about how liberals are anti-green lawns and want to cast nice lawns as racist and somehow brings Jews into it too.

Trending story titles: "Tucker’s Tome" by Steve Sailer, "A Liberal Dose of Nonsense" by Taki, "The Week That Perished, Jun 9" by Takimag, "Nazis in Moderation" by David Cole, "Fight to the Death for Death!" by David Cole, "How Liberals Pay Off Their Bimbos" by Ann Coulter

Basically it's chock full, actually almost entirely consisting of, supercharged culture war posts with belligerent and sarcastic tones, few filters, and the like. I read Ann Coulter's piece, for example, and it contains a few trivially checked falsehoods which isn't strictly relevant but I found interesting (that the NYT did not cover the John Edwards campaign finance case which is trivially false; pulls 400k out of nowhere instead of 200k, which is bizarre; claims there's unequal treatment when Edwards did in fact go to trial, hung jury and dismissed) and is basically just a forum-style rant. Another post praises Tucker as an upstanding WASP. Another freely throws around terms like "tranny" and "faggy" and wishes pride protesters would get rolled by a steamroller. You can look for yourself.

In essence, this is not "oh you dug up something small the owner said who was owner of a part time gig you did ten years ago" as the framing, which happens sometimes and is bad. Nothing is hidden. Taki himself writes pieces on the front page! It's more like "you chose to participate in a media outlet that front-page peddles antagonistic things that most of our readers hate vehemently" and honestly that seems like a totally fair metric by which to select a writer for your newspaper. In other words, it's not so much guilt by association so much as we think you have a lack of professional judgement, are a reputational risk for us, and we also think your tone might not match our established tone and conduct.

Personally I think that though his own contributions are not as highly-charged, I think it does seem to violate the NYT's own policies, which also don't seem too out of the norm. From their ethics page:

Before accepting a freelance assignment, a staff member should make sure that the tone and content of the publication, website or program are in keeping with the standards of The Times. In general, a staff member should write nothing elsewhere that could not fit comfortably under his or her byline in The Times or that implies The Times’s sponsorship or endorsement.

Though I realize this is guidance for after employment, the hiring pages point to wanting candidates to already be basically following this or a similar ethics code. Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT. His actual articles, ehhh, kind of, though one in context might be interpreted as an HBD dogwhistle. So yeah. I think his case is a bit borderline but also fairly understandable. NYT might deserve pitchforks but not for this I don't think.

Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT.

"NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war" - Oct 20, 2023

I do hope that's a disproof, but, well....

I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying that the NYT is free of hypocrisy. I'm only saying that the implication that the only thing wrong with Khan, who is otherwise innocent, was he happens to know some disliked people is a bad implication. It's clear from context that he knowingly chose to write for a news outlet that trivially is observed to have very questionable ethics and a very strong viewpoint which is not at all NYT-like, so it was more his direct actions that led to his firing rather than some vague notion of distributed guilt. It wasn't like he wrote for an innocent, normal magazine whose name happens to be on a fancy New Yorker blacklist. Rather, he knowingly appeared right next to some very potent and arguably toxic stuff.

At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.

It's their job to do this. And SBF is such a convenient easy target to attack both the cryptosphere and the grey tribe that I'm starting to wonder if his rise wasn't an op. He did have super suspicious establishment ties after all.

Though what hits me here isn't that, but how mundane the crime of the undesirable nerds is now. Accusations of racism have so lost power that it almost seems laughable to lob them at people who barely even qualify. Like really, they'reis going to appeal to 90s colorblind liberalism in 2024? What a joke.

Not that it has to make any sense or have any relationship to the truth of course, the article only means "here are a bunch of enemies which aren't so miserable we can ignore them, so go fuck with them".

I do wonder what a rank-and-file rationalist or EA-ist looks like on politics, HBD, and so forth. My guess would be fairly woke, which makes this sort of attack amusing. But I don't actually know.

At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite. The media writes about them out of anthropological curiosity, in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon. Like there was a big NYT article about rationalist date-me-docs and the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting” that underlies all these pieces.

Of course the tone is more negative now after SBF. But sorry, yes, if a guy in your movement does an enormous fraud, has a high-profile trial, and goes to jail, your movement attracts negative attention. But this isn’t tearing down a threatening counter-elite, this is an anthropological piece about how that weird Amazonian tribe that turned on its neighbors is still being weird.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

There very obviously is a reasonably ideologically coherent right-wing counter-elite hiding in plain sight in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is the Grand Heresiarch, Roger Mercer was an early backer from the East Coast, and Steven Hsu, Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin were all early recruited talent. Right now the biggest players are Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, with David Sacks as court jester. Balaji Srinivasan is pursuing a separate project, but is clearly sympathetic. Richard Hanania's vomit-inducing hagiography of this group makes him the spoony bard of the movement. If the current elite is vulnerable to a coup by a shadowy cabal, then this group have the cash and talent to pull it off. They also control two important power centres - VC money (Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have the prestige, but A16Z and The Founders' Fund have the cool) and Twitter. The main reason the Thielosphere doesn't matter more is that Trump has cut off all the oxygen for any anti-establishment right movement that isn't MAGA, and the Thielosphere disagrees with MAGA on too many points to be allowed near power in a MAGA regime.

"Rationalists et al." are a group with cash and talent who are close to the Thielosphere on the social graph and are sufficiently hostile to the centre-left establishment that they might have been recruitable in a slightly different world. I am 90% confident that Thiel did spend serious cash and effort trying to bring Eliezer Yudkowsky into his network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached out to Scott Siskind as well. Cade Metz' hatchet job accused Scott, almost certainly correctly, of being widely read within the Thielosphere, and therefore presumably sympathetic.

If I was advising George Soros and Klaus Schwab on emerging threats to their world empire, I would include the Thielosphere on the list of things that aren't an immediate threat but need an eye kept on them if they become one. And if I were the Globohomo Elite, Third Class assigned to dealing with the Thielosphere then stopping them absorbing the rationalists would be part of my job. Obvious options include threatening to drive the rationalists out of polite society unless they dissociate themselves from right-wing heresy (worked on Eliezer) or offering a more attractive alternative.

Amusingly, the flow of money from SBF into effective altruism probably was part of the reason that the Thielosphere and the rationalists parted company. SBF was a (as it turns out, rogue) member of the establishment - even to the point of which VCs invested in him (Sequoia backed FTX largely because they were afraid of A16Z becoming the dominant player in crypto). Peter Thiel couldn't or wouldn't compete with SBF in rationalist-buying. If that was an op, then someone has earned a promotion to Globohomo Elite, Second Class.

People on this forum give these guys way too much credit. The tech/VC types keep making the same mistake of thinking that money and power are the same thing. I’ll update my priors if they can get the politics of their own backyard, SF, in any kind of reasonable order. Visit SF and visit NY and decide for yourself if the tech guys are in any way competent enough leaders to govern better than the finance and law guys.

I’m skeptical (they seem too busy cranking out AI SaaS slop to do anything serious) but who knows.

The tech people are not in charge in SF, and never have been.

thats my point, despite having a ton of money they’ve totally failed to accomplish anything political

If money was all someone needed to become powerful we'd be loving in the 2010s era neoliberal anomie of President Michael Bloomberg and be all the better for it. Power is relative influence over other people to action ones will, but oftentimes what matters is getting people to do something they were inclined to do anyways and convince them that it was your idea. No amount of high end pulled pork buffets could get people motivated to attend Bloombergs political rallies, and no amount of VC lavishing on startups can generate politically influential mass. Commies and MAGA capture the politically motivated crazies dedicated enough to waste time on entryist politics, VC captures nerds who would prefer to jerk off to, and play, MOBA games.

Yes. This is my point. These people are not/unable to make themselves politically relevant.

More comments

From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.

I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.

I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.

Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.

More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.

And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.

Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".

Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).

I disagree. Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action. They are the counter elite who are waiting in the wings for when (if) the existing elite collapses.

These people are the smart ones who have been excluded, and the current elite feel the wind shifting. Thus, the attack.

I feel it is more likely they (2010s white and asian men left behind in the current cultural conversation yet resourced enough to weather a storm independently) successfully sequester like a NIMBY John Galt (we see this with St George county in Baton Rouge) as opposed to forming a successful political movement sympathetic to their plight to wrest control. An existing elite collapsing will just lay bare the rotten bones of the system cannibalized by current incompetence, and enough of the rationalists do see the rot present even now, disincentivizing the seizing of the current reigns.

Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action.

They're also privileged (i.e. have above-average incomes).

in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon.

I'm pretty sure the authors of pieces about isolated tribes in the Amazon don't go on Twitter to gloat about how it made the subjects "seethe" and scatter in fear. Are you going to update?

If the Amazonian tribesmen could seethe on Twitter the authors certainly would go on and gloat.

  • -10

They can, and that's not the response we got.

Agreed,

In addition, SBF and his associates have the issue of being, not strawmen per se, but a near-perfect encapsulation of what critics of utilitarianism say utilitarianism will lead to in practice, which makes them a go to example for said critics.

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

Sure they are. Americans have a very weird way of talking about the elites, where I always have the impression they only ever mean "elected representatives" or "the ultra-rich". Intellectual elites are a thing too, and that's exactly who's threatened by the Rats, and who's writing the hit pieces.

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite

And yet they can apparently brainwash scammers with billions of dollars to follow their quasi-religion and donate money to them. I think you're underselling the importance of cultural influence.

the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting”

Somehow, this weirdness only ever seems to be interesting to the prestige media when it's connected to VCs and other powerful people.

If that's not the deciding factor, how come they don't report on the much more sensational lolcow antics kiwis are obsessed with? My terminally online ass has hung out with weird and interesting people for decades and I only ever see them in the media when either they do something insanely criminal or get access to any significant amount of power.

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

The wider world of normies really needs to know more about his saga, it's hilarious!

This is the trial streamer guy right? Some people just can’t help themselves. What happened now?

It appears he may have serious substance abuse problems and be a swinger of sorts, and he and his wife and another female friend were arrested on drug charges recently. This all happened a few months after someone sent him a Sonichu medallion in the mail along with a note saying "you are the next chosen one" or something like that. He wore the medallion on stream, leading people to theorize that it was cursed.

Edit: there's also a child endangerment charge in there, I'm assuming it's related to something involving his own kid

I just find it tragic and sad honestly. Expose the one guy online that seems to have his shit together to the power of the Sonichu medallion and consequences will never be the same.

Well yes, the media focuses on powerful, influential people, and on crime.

I do think mainstream left-leaning media (NYT et al) have been tacking more toward center of late because of the visible success of new platforms and publications with more moderate, rationalist-adjacent takes. I'm thinking of Substack (Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias), or The Free Press, for examples. Not necessarily huge success in what has long been described as a dying market, but enough that mainstream media is at least taking notes.

Razib Khan is a journalist who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.

He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper- he studied genetics, worked in population genomics and then something to do with the cat genome.

He's been writing a lot but I'm not sure if he's quit his day job to concentrate fully on writing. In any case, given the reputation journalists have, and that he has a substack with a number of excellent essays it's unfair to describe him as 'journalist'. Writer, maybe.

Anyway: in particular, 'The Wolf at History's Door" is a must-read essay for anyone unfamiliar with early human history or very late prehistory.

He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper

I hate living in a world where these two things are qualifiers for being a 'journalist'. Journalism is something you do and journalists are the people who do it, no more, no less.

Don't we all hate living in the world where 'Terrorists Won' ?

Reading Rufo's book at the moment. I was aware of most of details, but when you outline the case that yes, practically every major government, or educational institution in the US has been taken over by a memeplex hardly distinguishable from the post FAFO Weathermen, it is unsettling.

Sure just ~10% of population believes that shit, but that's till more than enough to hold together the bioleninist coalition and keep pushing to abolish 'the system'.

This kind of professionalization is older than the New Left, although they're certainly beneficiaries of it.

Yeah, the New Left is ultimately a creation of people who wanted to tear down the managerial regime created by FDR and his creatures.

It started as that, but the New Left was captured by the managerial state in the process of capturing it and now they're its biggest beneficiaries. That whole thing about the hippies cutting their hair and getting jobs and becoming yuppies.

OK, I changed it to "scientist and writer". FWIW, I did not intent any insult with the use of the word journalist.

This essay is closer to history than whatever KulakRevolt usually comes up with, but they are still in the same league.

Razib has published reputable papers on paleogenetics and Indo-European history, and I have yet to hear from anybody who knows the field and thinks he's talking nonsense (I mean w/r/t paleogenetics, obviously there will always be HBD haters). Burden of proof is yours in this case, I should think.

The biggest thing that annoyed me was the conflation of the switch to pastoralism of the Pit Grave culture, the invention of the chariot (which happened much later) and the switch to horseback riding (which happened even later). The other thing was the idea that it was pastoralism that enabled the "restless young men" to form warbands, even though we see this in all kinds of societies.

Kulak plays fast and loose with facts and gets very creative, as far as I can tell Razib doesn't.

they are still in the same league.

Is that criticism or praise? I've seen some strong opinions on both sides about Kulak.

Why not both?

Because I care about historical accuracy when I read essays about history. I think someone's ability to judge the historical accuracy of "early human history or very late prehistory" is orthogonal to whether they view KulakRevolt in a positive or negative light. If someone does have a good knowledge of that part of human history and is in a position to judge the accuracy of the linked article, I want to hear from them! I want to know how to adjust my Baysean weights on this topic. "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" has less weight than "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a good description of the history", and maybe I'd even adjust in the other direction if I saw ""One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a deceptive retelling of history and provides examples". What we got is "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person implies they know about this topic and makes an ambiguous post about their view", and that's not a valuable contribution.

That was a great read! Thank you for the recommendation.

either the donations can be kept or not.

Yeah I was under the impression in cases like this any donations or gifts the fraudster has given are clawed back regardless of context.

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