Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.
“object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy
I hadn’t linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.
could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set
I’m not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don’t know tankies to be HBD proponents).
just to be normal
Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn’t invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.
Yeah, this is just as much or more a narrativisation of the inevitable conceptual trend as it is an attempt to explain what actually happened one event after another. If I were writing a book it would go next to much longer passages about racism and race science in American and world history and about race science in California Ideology land and the rationalist movement itself. This story would appear with a “but LessWrong would always have turned out this way”.
It’s notable, I think, that you can tell the same sort of story about Spencer back in the 19th century: as long as you have the backbone of naive biologism, everything will come out right for your Imperial project.
I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.
In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.
And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).
In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.
Yeah the original no-politics rule on lesswrong baked in libertarian assumptions into the discourse (because no-politics means the default political assumptions of the major writers and audience are free to take over). From there is was just a matter of time until it ended up somewhere right wing.
I hadn’t linked the tendency to go meta to the cultishness or no-politics rule before, but I can see the connection now that you point it out. As you say, it prevents simply naming names and direct quotes, which seems to be a pretty good tactic for countering racists.
I’m not sure that rule-set made HBD hegemony inevitable, there were a lot of other factors that helped along the way! The IQ-fetishism made it ripe for HBDers. The edgy speculative futurism is also fertile ground for HBD infestation. And the initial audience and writings having a libertarian bend made the no-politics rule favor right wing ideology, an initial audience and writing set with a strong left wing bend might go in a different direction (not that a tankie internal movement would be good, but at least I don’t know tankies to be HBD proponents).
Yeah, it seems really rare for a commenter to simply say racism is bad, you shouldn’t invite racists to your events. Even the ones that seem to disagree with racism impulsively engage in hand wringing and apologize for being offended and carefully moderate their condemnation of racism and racists.
also that a lot of members of the subculture were already race scientists, e.g. Moldbug and Razib Khan
Yeah, this is just as much or more a narrativisation of the inevitable conceptual trend as it is an attempt to explain what actually happened one event after another. If I were writing a book it would go next to much longer passages about racism and race science in American and world history and about race science in California Ideology land and the rationalist movement itself. This story would appear with a “but LessWrong would always have turned out this way”.
It’s notable, I think, that you can tell the same sort of story about Spencer back in the 19th century: as long as you have the backbone of naive biologism, everything will come out right for your Imperial project.
I think it misses the word for the trees to put the emphasis on a libertarian bent. The British and American class systems are perfectly capable of enforcing the same rules for prestige and polite discussion in order to favour some preferred hegemonic power without endorsing libertarian values. Indeed libertarianism as a movement most certainly adopts those rules because - for all that it may derive political support from (primarily white) guys of all sorts of backgrounds - it’s a fundamentally aristocratic proposition, right down to almost absurdist details such as its propensity to distribute land amongst an elite who employ lesser beings to work it.
In the case of rationalism, the emphasis should instead be on control: Yudkowsky built his system to control what was and wasn’t acceptable thinking, ostensibly for the benefit of the thinker. Its departures from actually very good patterns of thinking are what take it into cult territory, as the rigidity of the rules meets the hard wall of reality, and forces adherents to choose between reality and fantasy.
And as I say below to David, sure, there were other trends in play (most especially - as I note above as well - the tendency for America’s moral arc to bend towards racism). But I’d push back on suggesting that IQ-fetishism is distinct from naive biologism. Rather, IQ-fetishism itself is an expression of naive biologism (as we can see tracing its antecedents through back to Herbert Spencer), because you don’t get IQ-fetishism without the spectres of relativism and nurturism which, politically, it purports to counter-act - “IQ” is a supposedly sound, stable, measurable, cognitive category, where the alternative is understood to be a tangled mess of occult entities which cannot be reduced to any structure in the brain (and IQ holds out the promise of being reducible to g, which is in its whole conception reducible to a structure in the brain).
In this way the speculative futurism is simply of a piece with the biologism: once you reduce everything to (this very peculiar and highly naive, already science-fictional, concept of) the physical, you can manipulate it to generate whatever future you want. By the same token, the eugenic and fascistic trend in science-fiction pursues the same conceptual route. But it is only with the right historical ingredients, and the right players to activate those ingredients - which is to say an unequal society and the tendency to have people who want to naturalise that inequality - that the mixture becomes potently racist, and Yudkowsky, so to speak, is the one building the pot to specification.