reposting David’s repost of Scott Alexander’s leaked neoreaction and race science emails - eviltoast
David Gerard (@davidgerard@circumstances.run)
circumstances.run
Attached: 4 images just reposting the 2014 leaked email about how Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) had specifically intended Slate Star Codex to promote neoreaction and race science not a single person denied the email, they were just outraged at the leaker for breaking confidence Yudkowsky even declared that they should be shunned, lol this email is surprisingly little spoken of, I keep finding SSC/ACX readers who've never heard of it. for once the rationalists had the good sense not to fuss about it i keep pointing centrists at this email and they can't reconcile the SSC article they liked with the writer of SSC explicitly saying he's trying to make them more racist if you're wondering why techbros are all neoreactionaries these days, it's because they received scott's message fidelitously. SSC is a major vector of techfash radicalisation. reasons to keep the fuckin receipts text of scott email: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/gntraiv/ topher brennan tweets when posting the email: https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say

hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

  • self@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I really should do that deep dive into Moldbug/Yarvin’s earlier garbage soon. last time I brought urbit up on r/SneerClub, some weird fucker stumbled upon the thread 5 days later (by searching for urbit — all of their other posts were either urbit related or on r/SSC) and tried to debate me on “how do you know it’s fascist”

    like fuck I don’t know, maybe it’s the user and developer base being just all fascists? the only folks I can prove are using it are that one cryptocurrency nazi suicide cult that got exposed a few months ago

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      i looked into this and put it into the Neoreactionary Movement article on RationalWiki. Current version of the paragraph:

      Moldbug’s early “The magic of symmetric sovereignty” (19 May 2007)[44] is short, comprehensible, and gets its point across in 1,666 words, rather than barely getting started in that much space. Its thesis is that totalitarian sovereignty would work well if it were unassailably secure. His arguments are made of handwaves and holes, but the interesting bit is the libertarian-style thinking, in which all the hard bits of politics and why humans are complicated are handwaved away because he wants so much for his reasoning to reach his desired conclusion. If something looks like an insufficiently-explained logical leap, don’t assume he’ll get around to properly explaining himself later. Much as per Yudkowsky’s style on Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, the apparent references lead to references leading to references, and hardly ever resolve to clear and well-supported substantiation.

      …

      After early-period commenters kept calling out his ridiculous misuse of basic terms and glaring factual errors, Moldbug adopted his better-known style, in which he spends a few thousand words redefining English to make his striking theses (e.g., “America is a communist country”[46]) less transparently ludicrous.

      https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement