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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2613 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'll admit right away that I'm late to the party - the Motte, SSC and the subculture around all of it seems to have pretty much died down and I'm not sure where to find everyone other than Twitter, which I refuse to use. But I think I want to catch up with all of the stuff that happened and was important to you all at the time. I'm aware of multiple SSC best-of compilations, but what about the others? Don't we have some legacy other than Scott?

So, to the survivors, I have two questions:

  • What do you think are the best articles/arguments/comments/posts of the past decade?
  • What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?

Substack is alive and well, and there are a whole number of good posters in adjacent topics, some of which used to be prolific posters on themotte (hwfo,kulak) but most, as expected, are from other places. The problem is that themotte is starting to outlive its usefulness - twitter is better for low effort posts and a pretty open platform nowadays, substack is similarly open but better suited for quality content, and the overton window has shifted so much that Scott is now effectively writing about the things he more-or-less banned us for. Though I'm still a bit salty he isn't apologizing or at least referencing to themotte about it in retrospect, overall I'm much more happy about it.

Themotte, in contrast, has always been more a medium-effort discussion platform that discussed high-effort content as opposed to generate it. Which is just a bit of awkward spot to be in.

Also, since nobody has mentioned it, you should definitely take a look at thelastpsychiatrist/Alone/Edward Teach. He was a significant influence on Scott, and roughly stopped posting (2014) at the time when Scott blew up (incidentally, this was also shortly after I became familiar with Scott). He's definitely more on the esoteric side than the rationalist side, though.

I think the general Rationalist subculture still plenty sizeable. Maybe not at its peak size, but certainly not a dead online community. Commenting on astral codex ten and participating on the SSC are still fun uses of time imo.

My personal favourite non-Scott blog is putanumonit.com, I recommend looking through his archive/best of page. I got into the community through the fiction, Unsong was how I found Scott, and HPMOR was what really cemented my membership in rationality.

I was originally drawn to the SSC community by Scott's Moloch article, which I came across at a time in my life when I was struggling to put a name on the concept.

I'd consider the following incredible and some of the most important internet writings of the last decade:

Handwaving Freakoutery's work on Memespace Egregores - similar to the concept of Moloch, this also put a name to an incredibly powerful force I found difficult to name. I actually think this explains almost the entire modern internet.

John Fawkes: The Incentive Problem at the heart of the American Justice System - I have struggled for the longest time to wrap my head around how bad the system in America is, because there seem like so many low hanging easy fixes. This laid it out for me in clear terms how the incentives in place actively work against any such improvements.

The sequences on LessWrong are probably also probably fairly big.

(Do be aware, though, that Eliezer definitely isn't infallible.)

What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?

Well there's no way of talking about any of this without bringing up Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. People either love it or hate it but it is truly one of the stories of all time.

It's less core, but Unsong is also quite an experience.

Sorry, I missed something. Why is MoR associated with SSC? I vaguely know something about LessWrong being the 'less racist' offshoot of the SSC culture war discussions, and Yudowsky is associated with LessWrong for (reasons???), but I don't know how that leads into MoR being a culture war flashpoint or even signpost.

In the beginning, there was Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias. Yud started Less Wrong as an offshoot of that. Scott posted there and was a big fan of Yud. Yud brought his ideas greater prominence with Methods of Rationality. Scott later branched away with SSC. At about that time there were a bunch of people on lesswrong dumping Yud's Enlightenment/rationality/AI-alarmism ethos for neo-reaction. That was basically the origin of the culture war thread, one of Scott's earliest big posts was about an anti-neoreactionary FAQ, that's where conventional politics came into play. Then of course there was 2016 and lots of people got more political...

So MoR is a sibling or uncle of SSC.

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