This tweet helped me put into focus @glenweyl objections to the rationality community visa vie Neoreaction, which had previously seemed bizarre to me.
https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1358572547021959173
He seemed to be emphasizing the (I claim!) tenuous historical and social connection between the rationalists and Neoreaction.
(My understanding of the connection: Lots of Neoreactionaries read LessWrong back in the day (because it was great!), but very few LessWrongers were, or are, Neoreactionaries.
Most LWers thought it was pretty obviously absurd. A few thought NRX was a kind of strange curiosity with some maybe-interesting ideas.
And my guess is that NRx-ers are vaguely dismissive of LessWrongers as naive about power and overly STEM-y.
And my guess is that NRx-ers are vaguely dismissive of LessWrongers as naive about power and overly STEM-y.
On the 2016 LessWrong survey, there appear to have been a total of 26 people who identified as "Neoreactionary" political out of about 3083 respondents.)
lesswrong.com/posts/mLALYcWR…
lesswrong.com/posts/mLALYcWR…
But I'm currently understanding part of Glen's central concern to be a matter of IDEOLOGICAL distance, along a dimension he thinks is important, between the rationalists and the NRx, which is getting mixed up with a claim about social distance.
I think that he thinks that many rationalists, or the rationalist ideology, is making an important mistake, which is similar to / the same as / leads to a mistake made by far-right NRx folks.
That mistake is something like "thinking that there are more-rational people who know better, and the world would be better off if they were in charge."
I think that Glen does sincerely believe that the rationalists and NRx are more socially connected than I think is true, but I guess that that is only a partial crux for him, because he thinks rationalists and NRx share a common ideological underpinning.
And because of this, in his view, there's a fundamental similarity, even if they the two world views are, along other dimensions, diametrically opposed.
https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1361032124980150276?s=20
Furthermore, he thinks that there's a kind of "convener belt" from reading Yudkowsky, to eventually buying into Yarvin's ideology.
https://twitter.com/glenweyl/status/1361032131942764557
I think that that is false, or at least not representative.
But I don't know. Maybe this is a thing? I imagine that Glen is interacting with a very different cross section of the rationality community than I am.
But I don't know. Maybe this is a thing? I imagine that Glen is interacting with a very different cross section of the rationality community than I am.
That is crux for my sense of how to frame this:
If I thought that a sizeable fraction of rationalists (~10% or more) were gradually adopting NRx-like views, I would think it is much more appropriate to talk about the two groups in the same breath.
If I thought that a sizeable fraction of rationalists (~10% or more) were gradually adopting NRx-like views, I would think it is much more appropriate to talk about the two groups in the same breath.
But I currently think that number is closer to 1%.
@glenweyl, if you bother to read this, of course please feel free to correct any places where I've misapprehended you.
* conveyor belt
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