Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals that incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics. It's probably the best book to read for understanding how we got politically and intellectually from where we were in 2010, to where we are now.
If you want a book on the rationalists that's not a smear dictated by a person who is banned from their Wikipedia page for massive npov violations, I hear Chivers' The AI Does Not Hate You and Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy are good.
(Disclaimer: Chivers kinda likes us, so if you like one book you'll probably dislike the other.)
It might be fair play, however. If I correctly recall, LessWrong had, for a while, a prominent wiki admin who had been punted from Wikipedia for his frothing npov.
I am not aware of Less Wrong having a Wikipedia admin. Are you perhaps thinking about David Gerard, admin of RationalWiki and Wikipedia, who once got in trouble for his decade-long internet crusade against Scott Alexander?
> incubated the neoreactionary movement that is currently dominant in US politics
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
You are presenting a highly contentious worldview for the sake of smearing an outgroup. Please don't. Further, the smear relies on guilt by association that many (including myself) would consider invalid on principle, and which further doesn't even bear out on cursory examination.
At least take a moment to see how others view the issue. "Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... includes lengthy commentary on Sandifer (a close associate of Gerard)'s involvement with rationalism, and specifically on the work you cite and its biases.
Ironically, bringing this topic up always turns the conversation to ad-hominem attacks about the messenger while completely ignoring the subject matter. That's exactly the type of argument rationalists claim to despise, but it gets brought up whenever inconvenient arguments appear about their own communities. All of the comments dismissing the content because of the author or refusing to acknowledge the arguments because it feels like a "smear" are admitting their inability to judge an argument on their own merits.
If anyone wants to actually engage with the topic instead of trying to ad-hominem it away, I suggest at least reading Scott Alexander's own words on why he so frequently engages in neoreactionary topics: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/comment/g...
Some select quotes:
> First is a purely selfish reason - my blog gets about 5x more hits and new followers when I write about Reaction or gender than it does when I write about anything else, and writing about gender is horrible. Blog followers are useful to me because they expand my ability to spread important ideas and network with important people.
> Third is that I want to spread the good parts of Reactionary thought
> Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things (like the crime stuff, or the WWII history, or the HBD) from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.
In this case, HBD means "human biodiversity" which is the alt-right's preferred term for racialism, or the division of humans into races with special attention to the relative intelligence of those different races. This is an oddly recurring theme on Scott Alexander's work. He even wrote a coded blog post to his followers about how he was going to deny it publicly while privately holding it to be very correct.
> Ironically, bringing this topic up always turns the conversation to ad-hominem attacks about the messenger while completely ignoring the subject matter.
This is not a fair or accurate characterization of the criticism you're referring to.
> All of the comments dismissing the content because of the author or refusing to acknowledge the arguments because it feels like a "smear" are admitting their inability to judge an argument on their own merits.
They are not doing any such thing. The content is being dismissed because it has been repeatedly evaluated before and found baseless. The arguments are acknowledged as specious. Sandifer makes claims that are not supported by the evidence and are in fact directly contradicted by the evidence.
That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target.
The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.)
The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got banned for doxxing a Wikipedia editor during Gerard's earlier edit war at the time of Manning's gender transition, for which Gerard was also sanctioned[7].
I always find it interesting that when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.
Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.
It's no secret that Scott Alexander had a bit of a fixation on neoreactionary content for years. The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas and he enjoyed the extra traffic it brought to his blog. I know the rationalist community has been working hard to distance themselves from that era publicly, but dismissing that chapter of the history because it feels too much like a "smear" or because we're not supposed to like the author feels extremely hypocritical given the context.
There are certain parts of the history of the rationalist movement that its enemies are orders of magnitude more "fixated" on than rationalists ever were, Neoreaction and the Basilisk being the biggest.
Part of evaluating unusual ideas is that you have to get really good at ignoring bad ones. So when somebody writes a book called "Neoreaction: a Basilisk" and claims that it's about rationality, I make a very simple expected-value calculation.
I've always been very skeptical of Scott "Alexander" after he and his supporters tricked half of reddit into harassing some journalists for "doxxing" him when his identity was public knowledge seemingly because he just really didn't like the takes presented by the journalists. The way he refers to them like it was a hit piece targeting him reeked of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.
The details are important here. His identity was "public knowledge" in the sense that regular readers of his blog could sometimes find links to his previous blog, and somewhere on that previous blog he mentioned his name. So many of his long-term readers knew.
But in the opposite direction -- if all you knew was Scott's full name, and you did a Google search -- there was no connection to the blog. You could find his professional web pages, and that was it.
What the NYT journalists threatened was to make a #1 search result for his full name that would expose his private life and his pseudonymous blog to all potential patients trying to find out some information about their doctor. Which would practically cost him his job.
And, ultimately, Scott did lose his job. The fact that writing on Substack turned out to be more profitable than his former job was a lucky coincidence.
If the stakes were so high he shouldn't have been so careless with using his real name. As a professional psychiatrist it is 100% on him to make sure these situations aren't a possibility and if that isn't possible- it's really not that big of a deal to simply not blog about your deeply unrestrained and potentially offensive opinions about [insert culture war here].
This is not the fault of the nytimes and given the success of his blog, it absolutely would have happened eventually. It is frankly irresponsible on his part. He chose that profession and with it comes certain sacrifices made for the wellbeing of his patients.
Further he went on crazy rants about how the article was a hit piece which is deeply dramatic and maybe even a little egotistical. He's not nearly as important as he thinks - and the nytimes piece covered him in a fairly neutral way from my perspective.
You should read it if you haven't. It's an enlightening piece about the burgeoning semi-conservative movement masquerading as pseudo liberalism amongst so called thought leaders in silicon valley and tech more generally.
> when the topic of rationalists' fixation on neoreactionary topics comes into question, the primary defenses are that it's important to look at controversial ideas and that we shouldn't dismiss novel ideas because we don't like the group sharing them.
No. Rationalists do say that it's important to do those things, because that's true. But it is not a defense of a "fixation on neoreactionary topics", because there is no such fixation. It only comes across as a fixation to people who are unwilling to even understand what they are denigrating.
You will note that Scott Alexander is heavily critical of neoreaction.
> Yet as soon as the topic turns to criticisms of the rationalist community, we're supposed to ignore those ideas and instead fixate on the messenger, ignore their arguments, and focus on ad-hominem attacks that reduce their credibility.
No. Nobody said that those criticism should be ignored. What was said is that those criticism are invalid, because they are. It is not ad-hominem against Sandifer to point out that Sandifer is trying to insinuate untrue things about Alexander. It is simply observing reality. Sandifer attempts to describe Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. as supportive of neoreactionary thought. In reality, Alexander, Yudkowsky et. al. are strongly-critical-at-best of neoreactionary thought.
> The leaked e-mails showed he believed there to be "gold" in some of their ideas
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41198053-neoreaction-a-b...