The Nonlinear Library LW - Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles by Zack M Davis
Mar 3, 2024
01:28:28
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles, published by Zack M Davis on March 3, 2024 on LessWrong.
It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it - no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was.
So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word woman (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify.
When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.
Really, that should have been the end of the story - with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with Something to Protect.
That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.
The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)
On 13 February 2021, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", the anticipated New York Times piece on Slate Star Codex, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (Just lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while pushing hard on the subtext to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades.
("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of Slate Star Codex. "Nominally"?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing.
Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The Times article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:
In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[1]
But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in "Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them" in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexand...
It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it - no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was.
So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word woman (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify.
When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.
Really, that should have been the end of the story - with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with Something to Protect.
That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.
The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)
On 13 February 2021, "Silicon Valley's Safe Space", the anticipated New York Times piece on Slate Star Codex, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (Just lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while pushing hard on the subtext to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades.
("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of Slate Star Codex. "Nominally"?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing.
Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The Times article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:
In one post, [Alexander] aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[1]
But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in "Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them" in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexand...