If you weren’t under a rock the past week, you will have heard that the New York Times finally went through with its threats to publish Scott Alexander’s real name in its write up about the Bay Area rationality community.
It was a disappointing effort, if not unpredictable. The author, Cade Metz, has no interest and took no interest in covering the most interesting and defining aspects of the rationality sphere (he is a normie… he wouldn’t get it). But he does kvetch a lot about how there is still a place on the Internet where high IQ people, mostly though not exclusively of liberal persuasions, gather to discuss topics that have been placed off limits. Or rather, gathered. For all of Metz’s labored efforts to tie down Scott Alexander to neoreactionaries “with racist beliefs”, the more banal reality is that there has been a soft ban on HBD topics at Scott’s blog since around 2017 – a timeline that syncs with my own observations of Bay Area culture (I did some presentations on futurism/IQ stuff to transhumanists in the early 2010s that received good responses… by 2016, I getting leaked reports that a couple of people felt “unsafe” around me). Nor is this observation something that’s specific to me. Cade Metz himself is good enough to link to a 2017 blog post by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who observed that by then China was de facto freer than the US:
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005.
Not that this belated attempt at disassociation ended up saving Scott Alexander.
Is this a big deal? Well certainly the New York Times printing the real name of a blogger who did not want it to be widely known, but who nonetheless doxed himself as Scott Siskind on the second post at his new Substack blog Astral Codex Ten, is pretty bad*. Then again, Pepe veteran Ricky Vaughn is being prosecuted essentially for posting memes on Twitter back in 2016. In this context, it’s hard to justify prioritizing this much.
Pro tip: Never explain yourself to SJWs. Unfortunately, Scott Alexander didn’t do that, instead opting to energetically disassociating himself from Charles Murray’s “offensive” views on race in his response to the NYT piece. This presumably being that Blacks have lower IQs than Whites, and that this is probably partly genetic. A view that is (1) mainstream amongst intelligence researchers, (2) is virtually unanimously backed by literally thousands of separate studies – probably the single most replicated result in psychology, and (3) centuries of stereotypes e.g. Ibn Khaldun.
Unfortunately, this flies in the face of several different public utterances, e.g. on IQ on Reddit:
My impression is that a Martian would consider “we shouldn’t study the genetics of race just in case it promotes racism, which can cause genocide” equally plausible to “we shouldn’t study the economics of inequality just in case it promotes communism, which can cause genocide” or “we shouldn’t study psychiatry, because we might learn some things that stigmatize people with psychiatric diseases, which can cause genocide”, or “we shouldn’t study evolution, because that could cast doubt on the Bible and destroy the moral foundations of our society, which could cause genocide”, or two hundred other possibilities along the same lines.
Since worrying about any of the others isn’t correlated with worrying about the race-science issue, I don’t think it’s a question of fixed cognitive styles. I think it’s just politics, pure and simple.
Or for that matter (his now deleted) travelogue as a doctor in Haiti with its rather blunt observations on the intellectual capacity of its denizens:
It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don’t understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just “they don’t want to do it” or “it never occurred to them”, but after months and months of attempted explanation they don’t understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy – harrowing at the best of times – positively unbearable. …
There are some doctors and nurses, who are just as bad – though none at our compound, which is run by this great charity that seems to be really on top of things. We heard horror stories of people graduating from nursing school without even knowing how to take a blood pressure – a nurse who used to work at the clinic would just make her blood pressure readings up, and give completely nonsensical numbers like “2/19”. That’s another thing. Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they’re wrong, so when cornered this nurse absolutely insisted that the blood pressure had been 2/19 and made a big fuss out of it. There are supposed to be doctors who are not much better, although as I mentioned our doctors are great.
In a more public capacity, e.g. his posts at the main SSC, he has to be more circumspect, e.g. the Kolmogorov option of navigating social taboos:
Scott Aaronson writes about the the Kolmogorov option (suggested alternate title: “Kolmogorov complicity”). Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible. He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists, and to make occasional very careful forays into defending people who needed defending. He used his power to build an academic bubble where science could be done right and where minorities persecuted by the communist authorities (like Jews) could do their work in peace.
This is all code. Those who get it, get it – the Reds and the Red-pilled, who both “get it” but have rather different policy prescriptions on what to do about it. Sort of like how in the Strugatsky Brothers’ book The Inhabited Island – itself a crypto-critique of Soviet power – in which the only two factions party to the esoteric and maddening “truths” are the “Unknown Fathers” who rule the totalitarian regime of Saraksh, and the “dissidents” intent on overthrowing them. In both cases, normies have no idea what is going on.
Just to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with Scott Alexander “throwing” Charles Murray overboard. Free speech in the Bay Area has become greatly constricted over the past few years and Scott Alexander presumably wants to retain a social life and his career as a psychotherapist. Besides, Murray himself has “disavowed” people more “edgy” than he is on several occasions. It’s what I call the Great Chain of Respectability. Anyone at the ideological edge has a motivation to ostracize anyone more “extreme” than they are so that they end up on the safe side of the Overton window, where censorship and social risks are far smaller. And besides, there are situations where the disavowing comes from genuine and cardinal disagreements over facts, not concern over career consequences.
Another point I’d like to make is that the cat is definitively out of the bag on this issue, already spreading all over Twitter and various blogs, so I don’t think I’m being inappropriate by linking to all of these things which had hitherto only been “well-known in narrow circles.” These comments about Haitians and Martians and Kolmogorov etc. are going to be, are already being, dug up and propagated. Next up will probably be a campaign against Substack. It uses the Stripe payment system which is an SJW company**. At a minimum, I assume they’ll want them to evict Moldbug and Nick Land, not to mention the growing numbers of other NRxers and outright Alt Righters who have been discreetly moving over there in the past few months. It will be interesting to see if they will succeed.
- Scott Alexander’s real name was long an open secret, he never took great pains to hide it. The main issue, as SA describes it, is that as a psychotherapist it is best for patients not to know too much about the person tasked with treating them. While a few minutes of searching would link SA with SS, with a NYT piece on it, that would appear on the first page of a Google search.
** Fun esoteric Russian nationalist lore: Nationalist mag Sputnik & Pogrom was deplatformed by them, which made a significant contribution to Egor Prosvirnin folding up the project.
UPDATE: There has been a minor edit that doesn’t make a substantive difference to the gist of the post.
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The rather limited ideological/racial discussions I have with domestic Chinese here at my university in Dalian would have me tossed out of the halls of the American academy in short order. As of last year, however, a growing number of white or J women were taking posts at the university (usually as English teachers) and attempting to police language in various social circles I was adjacent to. Linguistics requires a doctorate, so I was safely ensconced away from the ELA doghouse.
The solution for a free academia is to keep the following groups out of it:
-Jews
-White Women
With those two groups excluded, the organization will be able to innovate and police itself. With them, doom approaches. COVID has been a blessing keeping all those dumb cunts back in Santa Clarita or Lima Ohio or whatever bumfuck shitlib hellhole they came from.
Their only useful moment in the past century was getting Trumpenstein out of office.
Great post Anatoly. Somewhat related: did you read the recent opinion piece by Bogomolov (The Rapt of Europe 2.0, already named the “Bogomolov Manifesto” in the Russian Internet forums) and if you did, what do you think of it?
I have read several opinions about this text (including Prosvirnin’s take about it on Telegram in which he sites your work and ideas). All of the opinions appear negative. Same with Soloviov / Shapiro throwing around remarks about how courageous Uncle Adi has been during WWI.
Is it a new positioning of RusFed as the Noah’s Arc for conservatives?
As per Sam Altman’s comment on China…I don’t know about China as much, but I know Vietnamese who say that back home, as long as you don’t trash talk the government, they don’t really care what you do or say. I would imagine that the case is perhaps similar with China?
I can definitely see that many overtly authoritarian systems could be more free than the “Free World”. Authoritarians just care about the party line. Totalitarians must control everything public and private.
The Woke are totalitarian all the way.
Centralized versus decentralized totalitarianism – the decentralized witch-hunting mob is quite a bit worse than one would imagine.
this guy never wrote anything of value, so who cares. i’m puzzled why the HBD sphere thinks he was important.
but yes, it is indeed true that many people all over the political spectrum are privately HBD aware, even if they deny it hard in public.
Lewis Carrol opposed admitting women into the traditional British academies. England in his time was under the moral rules of an old German lady, a Merkel type, whom he appeared to satirise as the Queen of Hearts. Once politics becomes moral rather than economic or religious based then the feminine sensibilities take over. I recall experiences with women academics. “I once innocently said that admiring Classical culture was not per se racist. There was a shocked response. “White New Zealand replying.” The academic who said that later threw a plate at my friend leaving him with physical and mental scars. Recently, I made an off remark, that I would love to teach in Turkey but I have a picture of myself stuck in a classroom with “fat Turkish boys”. That was repeated back with disgust. But I only meant it literally.
I’m not sure you signal boosting this stuff hurts SA but certainly doesn’t help him.
It was like that in China. To quote the inestimable Godfree Roberts. China was ruled by Colmar Brunton. There were three thought controlled subjects. The three ts, Taimaneon Square, Tibet, Taiwan. The first one, one never mentioned at all. The others one just toted the Party line and they were not perennial issues. Then Xi became President and things changed overnight. Politics is now taboo in the classrooms. It has not descended into prissiness and ridiculousness. However I have heard Xi has a mistress.
That depends on the outcome.
https://spandrell.com/2021/2/18/the-based-draft
Like Kevin MacDonald and Giraldi?
It’ll be all good after he learns life is better with 20 bmi and a qt trad wife.
Politics is not taboo in Chinese classrooms. My daughter’s international school is teaching state-mandated Marxism curriculums to 7 year olds. Who told you this?
Indeed. Thankfully the Middle Kingdom’s distaste for Britain and its degenerate monarchy keeps them away from that most Victorian of ideologies — feminism.
I can’t read Bogomolov but I wouldn’t be surprised if awareness of the potential for this grows.
I was reading background on Woke ideology the other week and was surprised that you don’t need to go that far back to encounter straightforward Marxist/Hegelian stuff. So former Soviet countries should also be ahead of the curve on knowledge of the latest ‘cutting edge’ Western ideology.
Well they do complain (or used to complain) about rampant corruption, though never specifically about the top communist party leaders. I think it’s safe because it’s acknowledged as a problem by the party.
I think many among those who lived under Communism are immunized against Wokism. The more it increases and the more we reject it.
Tyler Cowen, Eric Weinstein, Scott Aaronson admit they care a lot. I bet Elon Musk has read a fourth of his blog posts. The man is a wimp but he has some powerful friends.
The vast majority of his writing is silly. But. He is a psychiatrist and he writes openly about modern psychiatric issues and practice and if you are interested in those topics and you are not a psychiatrist his writing is essential to skim.
The most interesting fallout to me is he now is in Walnut Creek. Unlike Berkeley and San Francisco, Walnut Creek is a very nice place. Almost no homeless people. Few negroes. Nobody relieving themselves on your front lawn. Five years from now he is going to look back at this crisis and wonder why he gave a damn. (I predict!)
Doctinaire Marxism is really a religion or a pseudo science. Prior to Xi, Marxism was becoming a dead religion. It was not mandated in classrooms or perhaps often ignored. A bit I suppose like masks in the Covid-19 era. However Xi is establishing a cult in China not seen since Mao whom he professes to follow. I taught in China for ten years.
Well, I’d have to admit I don’t think I’ve ever read anything he’s written and had only been very vaguely aware of him prior to the big flap about his sudden departure from the Internet.
My impression is that he tended to write half-way “edgy” quasi-HBD analysis, the sort of thing that virtually every intellectual in the world would have considered rather bland and milquetoast back fifty or sixty years ago. Didn’t that silly Jordan Peterson fellow become famous because he was “daring” enough to suggest that men might generally be a bit taller than women or something like that?
Since some of the commenters here seem far more knowledgeable about Alexander, I wonder if they could provide links to three or four of his most interesting pieces so I could judge for myself if there’s any there there?
Imagine being so pathetic that you say things like this.
I commend you on your excellent comment.
In other words only Jews and Nazis know what is going on, as a fellow Unz contributor has noted
Probably about 5% of his output.
Most famous work is probably this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Followed by this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Probably my favorite “HBD” post is the review of Albion’s Seed: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
Lots of humor, e.g. the most recent one: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/list-of-fictional-cryptocurrencies
Here are his top ten posts:
https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
Scott should go on the offensive now that he’s back, in the open, and trying to move forward. To do that he shouldn’t cower to any future attempts to smear him but rather simply be honest about what he believes and open to discussion on that. He already had to leave his old job, rearrange his life, sure there is still future stress but all things considered the popular support should be a rallying cry for those who want to honestly look at solving problems. The genie can’t be put back in the bottle. I’m not going to say he’s a cuck, but he should realise he’s not going to just move on from this easily.
That “Bloody Shovel” link was really entertaining. I like the Ying Bu idea; I like it a lot.
It’s objectively superior to my own suggestion, which is infiltration and putting ‘sand in the gears’: talented people will make their way up the hierarchy quickly and be able to put sand in many gears.
My suggestion is hard because of ideological filters at the HR level: in order to infiltrate you have to have a track record of saying only the right things, or nothing; as organised crime and gangs have known, if you want your guys in the military and police, it’s better if they’re cleanskins – but useful HBD cleanskins are really quite rare.
Undermining senior WokeBorg by Ying Bu-ing them, though? That’s exploiting the Little Eichmann‘s natural tendency: to parse everything they read using their Inner Richelieu –
Such a beautiful stratagem. Given that most Little Eichmanns are midwits, they’ll fall for it.
I thought his short story about the last unenlightened man on earth was brilliant and hilarious. I shared it with some vaguely “spiritual” friends, as I thought they would enjoy it and find its ending “deep”. I was hoping it would be a gateway drug to more SSC, which would be a gateway drug to actually being able to talk about political issues. Instead, they were silently disapproving, which I guess goes to show that independent thought and reasoning is a whole mode of existence, including its own aesthetics and humor.
Do you read anyone associated with the rationalist movement, like Hanson or Yudkowsky or the Less Wrong blog? I would think your natural proclivities and association with Karlin and, previously, Khan would indicate yes.
Not really. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of any of them.
That’s the thing. I’m just not into “gateway drugs” providing vague and tangential allusions to “controversial” political issues. I’d rather just discuss the political issues directly. That’s why I often much prefer books from many decades ago, when such topics were sometimes discussed in very straightforward terms.
Most of my articles deal with very factual issues of science, sociology, or history, and I enjoy attempting to solve factual puzzles in those fields rather than just windy philosophizing.
The Rationalists love that book. Appalachians do not. Elizier Yudkowsky on twitter back in 2017 wrote it would be a great idea to conduct overt biological warfare upon genetic Borderers. The writer of Albion’s Seed seemed to enjoy quoting the French traveller who compared Appalachian food to pig slop. Something like “they eat what we feed to the pigs”.
AK’s “never cuck” advice is sound. There is no upside.
The people you’re trying to purchase mercy from simply see it as an admission of guilt and those you’re under-bussing will rightly consider you a traitor.
Cucking in these situations means you’re still a Nazi and you have no friends.
Being a Nazi is much better with friends. Don’t feed a potential friend to the PC meat-grinder thinking you’re going to save yourself.
Yes, they do say that corruption is a major feature. Greasing palms to get things done seems pretty normal. But once the right palms are greased it seems pretty simple to actually get things done.
I would imagine you are right on why the government doesn’t mind complaints about corruption, since it is not seen as a direct challenge to the regime itself.
But they don’t matter, because within a few decades most of them will be dead.
How was getting Trump out of office useful? In what way are you better off now?
Even where Trump seemed markedly worse than his enemies (the Iran Deal), it turns out that his policies represent the new consensus. So really nothing is better and lots of things are worse.
Based on the title, I was expecting to read about Scott Alexander’s support for Bitcoin or Ethereum, so I’m a little disappointed.
Also partly because in Western academia and left wing circles it seems like they have already been airbrushed out or pushed down the memory hole. As if there is some kind of tacit agreement to draw a veil over that whole part of history; nothing to see there.
The answer my friend is – blowing in the wind.
(Wind brought with him the spirits and thus – enlivened all of the material worlds. And that’s why we breathe – and – are nowadays).
Warning: These lines above can quite easily be misunderstood as not really sincere for they touch a realm where laughter, ghosts, and inspiration share a square.
Or even better, when the de-centralized witch hunting mob also gets full support from a centralized power center, which seems to be where we are increasingly headed. Probably the only way to stay sane in such a system is to inhabit the fringes.
What is better is that now there is no illusion regarding who is really in charge, whereas previously Trump controlled at best 5% of what the regime was doing. Now they own Afghanistan, Iraq, decaying infrastructure, inept bureaucracies, crime, K to 12 and Higher education administrative bloat, cost disease/propaganda… Obviously, the NYT will blame everything on Republican obstructionism, but it won’t convince most normies.
I live in China, Mr. Pinsen. Trump going after China before taming domestic Wall Street Jews was pure idiocy and a form of reactionary politics I hope America grows out of.
That said it appears the pied piper of Israel is still leading his little minions. Hopefully the Dems grow some balls and start locking them up in re-education camps like China’s Uighurs.
Its probably not a very stable system.
Lately, I’ve come to appreciate crypto-HBD.
Of course, I think it encourages people to think for themselves, but I also like it on a personal level because, if you come at it from an HBD angle, then it is very thought-provoking without containing the extremely tedious disclaimers that real, mainstream HBD, like A Troublesome Inheritance, are inevitably full of today. And openly HBD books are very rare too – not published frequently – it is good to have crypto-HBD as a supplement to them.
If you want to learn Scott-Alexanderology in a minimum amount of time I would begin here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
If you wanted to learn Yudkowsky-Rationalism in a minimum amount of time I would suggest this is impossible. The word count on The Sequences + Harry Potter fanfic novel has got to be over 500 000 words. That is a rabbit hole labyrinth. It has a large overlap with Kurzweil singularity transhuman stuff though so most internet folk have probably been blasted with the bulk of the gist long ago.
If anybody knows a good estimate word count on (The Sequences + Harry Potter fanfic novel) I would be curious to see that.
Yes, of course. But you are smart and an independent thinker. Other people not so much!
It seems to me Yudkowsky is entirely without merit. I don’t really understand his elevated status. Has he ever said anything interesting, thought-provoking, and true? The fact that his magnum opus is a Harry Potter fanfic seems like it should be all we need to say about the guy. And yet Scott Alexander, whom I actually enjoy reading, seems to take him seriously.
Scott is sort of two men in one. On one hand is the intellectually curious and incisive writer, capable far more than most men of setting aside biases in honest pursuit of truth, and to communicate it in a way that is intelligent and enjoyable without being smug. I think this is Scott’s rational self.
But his irrational self, his heart of hearts, is an omega who reads Harry Potter fanfic and buys into all the most ridiculous Woke views on the mutability of sexuality and whose disgusting girlfriend still insisted on keeping other lovers, and he was cool with it, and then she dumped him anyway, and he took it hard but also stayed friends with her. He’s a leftist deep in his core, and he wants fellow leftists to love and respect him because he wants everything they want except the puritanical drive to burn heretics like himself at the stake. Which, alas for him, is increasingly all that drives them anymore.
Some things are worse, even at a personal level: a neighbor lost his good-paying job in the Dakotas, gasoline went up 18%, cancel culture and wokeism have intensified,… all of this in just one month.
But a few things are better too: the US-Russian arms treaty was extended and Biden doesn’t need to prove all the time that he is not a Putin stooge so relations with Russia might actually improve a little. Even on the Iran front, a new deal could be possible if the Europeans pushed for it. However, the Europeans being what they are, I wouldn’t count on that.
Woke people think sexuality is, on some level, a choice? I don’t think so.
Sexuality is spiritual and clearly isn’t genetic or directly biological; but the anxious of both right and left deceive themselves otherwise as it helps them to be simple and ignorant.
This tag might be worth perusing to see which (if any) of those controversial topics are up your alley.
https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/things-i-will-regret-writing/
This immunization is, of course, mostly not an opposition to communism, but conformity to the surface values it taught, as well as (in relation to immigration) nostalgia of the times before immigrants were allowed free internal movement.
The most awkward points of popular conflict of postcommunist societies to the West, are where late soviet ideology that most currently living citizens were still educated in, seems to directly conflict with current Western bourgeois ideologies – LGBT pride movements, acquiescence to US “imperialism”, and a still uncynical Western belief in what seems like the illusion of multiparty governance.
In the education, there is a rebranding of “soviet values” to “religious family values”, to be a patriot, respect for work, to never lie , etc – but there is now less state capacity* for disseminating these ideals.
Still I think the “immunization” will continue against Western ideologies, will continue, to the extent that the recent fashionable virtue-signalling Western ideologies, are not attractive for people with quite a different lifestyle and economic reality than exists outside of the Western countries (that is, outside of elite areas of elite cities in the non-West).
–
When you live under totalitarian propaganda long enough and learn that it’s mostly untrue and only a tool to control the population, then you develop a cynical rejection of any propaganda. I know quite a lot of people who have arrived at this point of realization after having been subjected to both Soviet and Western types of propaganda (including Western consumerist attitudes that are in fact a soft propaganda subtype).
Well, I glanced over those pieces, as well as a few of the others linked earlier. Perhaps it’s just my blindness, but I wasn’t at all impressed. All the pieces seem like many tens of thousands of words of vague, windy philosophizing, usually divorced from solid material, or at least the solid material was diluted by an endless sea of verbiage.
It brings to mind what people sometimes used to call “college bull sessions” except that I remember my own college dinner-table discussions being far more focused and serious.
My impression is that it’s the sort of thing you write if you want to be “edgy” but still stay away from “dangerous” subjects like Race or “conspiracy theories” or the true history of the Twentieth century. I find it difficult to believe that any credible scholar would take it seriously.
Yep, 500,000 words(!) of Harry Potter fanfic. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Just out of curiosity, I took the wordcount of a few of the long Alexander “posts”, and each came to over 30,000 words(!).
Meanwhile, over the last year or so I’ve published long articles on the true history of World War II, the “conspiracy theories” of the JFK Assassination/9-11 Attacks, and the intellectual history of American White Racialism, and each has run well under 30,000 words:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-mossad-assassinations/
https://www.unz.com/runz/white-racialism-in-america-then-and-now/
My very detailed analysis of American Meritocracy from a few years ago was also of the same length:
https://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Somehow I regard those as more serious and substantive works. Though I’d have to admit that Harry Potter is probably far more popular…
I don’t disagree with you on this. This was my quick shorthand for all of trans/non-binary/etc. ideology. “Mutable” not in how they see sexuality per se, but how they treat sexuality and reality itself. Indeed, the Orwellian insistence that Bruce Jenner was always a woman (“we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”) is one of the factors that really caused me to dial in to the evils of the Woke agenda. If they had merely said “Bruce Jenner became a woman” I might have slept through it.
Perhaps I’m simple and ignorant, but it seems in a sane society it ought to be enough to say men are plainly men, women are plainly women, and there is a tiny group of biologically intersex people produced as a result of birth defects about whom we can debate, if it’s relevant and we care to.
He’s promoted for the same reason libertarians/Milton Friedman/Austrian economics/Ayn Rand enthusiasts were promoted a generation ago. Namely, to poison the well. Just read the New York Times article about him. Look at how many of the people named are either Jews or fags.
You can’t understand why a nutty Jew is being promoted by other Jews and nutcases?
I read “Blood Meridian” the other day. Published back in the 80’s and still fresh (it seems to me). So insightful on these and many other topics.
The world is not a kind place and who knows if it may be you or me next in the cannibal’s pot waiting for the water to boil. Keeping your numbers and alphabet in good order would be increasingly difficult.
It is not so many years since long pork was regularly on the menu on the island of Hispaniola. Coming to academies on the mainland soon. What better way for the enlightened ones to show their true victory than by feasting on the vanquished. Each institution has large buildings suitable for use as banqueting halls. A roaring fire with an innocent victim screaming on the spit would be more entertaining than a BLM riot. Spiritual bankruptcy would be complete high IQ or no IQ.
Given that the Techarchs (Google, etc.) have delisted Unz.com, I doubt that anything anyone does here will affect Scott Alexander’s search engine results.
That was my experience in the supposedly autocratic, oppressive Middle East. As long as you don’t openly agitate against the regime (or Islam), you can pretty much say or do what you want. In a lot of ways, it was freer than the US. Even in arch-conservative Saudi Arabia.
That said, I did know a South Asian guy who was hauled off by the police for speaking against the regime. As far as I could tell, he was denounced to the authorities by another South Asian guy who had some personal beef with him. He was cleared and released after about a week, but it can’t have been pleasant.
In a number of fortunate individuals, but overall I wouldn’t say typical population of the postsoviet space is less susceptible to political propaganda than in the West; especially considering the political manipulations and conflicts we witnessed in the last ten years. On the other hand, I feel there is more apathy and apoliticism in most people compared to the countries like the USA, and I’m not sure that a higher level of apoliticism is a bad thing (politics is junk food for the soul).
He wouldn’t have lost his job if he had transitioned to green energy sooner. I would have lost my job in America when someone discovered my anti-semitism, but I pre-empted it and committed academic espionage for my seat in a Chinese university instead. The American working class needs to be as proactive and self-starting as their white-collar betters.
Sorry didn’t understand how you were using the term “sexuality”.
The Woke agenda on sex/gender (and actually everything) is about pushing people into more and more constricting boxes, while pretending this is some sort of liberation.
Theirs’ is a very strange ideology where a woman can be only so masculine until she should actually be classified as a man. It takes old stereotypes and reasonable generalisations and reifies them into mock biological categories.
It is actually encourages a form of narcissism, whereby you must somehow come to completely identify with your persona. It is a nightmare. A transgender teen who ” becomes” the other sex is like the institutionalization of a soldier as a soldier, but on steroids (and times a thousand).
A lot of these poor people will need liberating from their politically correct personas in their middle age, or else they will suffer greatly indeed.
I’ve enjoyed this fictional short story of his: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
You are absolutely correct here Dmitry.
Regarding post-Soviet space, a few years ago in Moscow I had a conversation with some young Russian scientists in my field, the discussion drifted towards politics. I was surprised how idealistic and extreme some of their judgements were. But that was of course a private discussion after we had a couple of alcoholic beverages. I remember thinking that some Russian intellectuals will probably never change. On the other hand, people in my family are completely apolitical.
When I was writing about being inmunized against propaganda, I was mainly referring to the Soviet-born people that I personally know in the West. They are of my generation or older and remember Perestroika rather well. Their overall mindset about the developments in the West is that masses, especially the younger generation, are being brainwashed by some faction of the elites. Something we cannot really understand though is what good (if any) will it make to the elites if the Western middle class is bulldozed by the new Queer Red Guard.
The whole thing is counter-intuitive, although there must be valid reasons to act the way they do. Dmitry Orlov has recently written about it, he has a couple of favorite theories, but as Ron Unz has written above, we don’t have real information, hence the whole philosophizing and conspiracy theoreticizing tropes in which we gleefully indulge.
It’s basically a hobby, like any other hobby albeit a bit extravagant one.
I believe that’s from the diary of Louis Philippe, former king of France.
It should be noted that he never to my knowledge denied any “HBD awareness,” unlike Tyler Cowen. He simply ignored the question. The “soft ban” was always quite soft, nothing could be said in the open threads, but in the hidden open threads you could usually discuss the subject so long as it wasn’t too blatant.
Thanks for reminding me. I normally read the NYT closely, but I’ve been so busy the last week or two producing audio versions of most of my more substantial articles that my NYTs have piled up, so I’ll try to take a look at it, which will probably increase my information about him by 50x or so.
I remember there was some gigantic flurry about Jordan Peterson a few years ago, so I finally tried to watch one of his most popular video lectures, but gave up after about 15m because it was so vacuous and worthless. Didn’t he supposedly become a drug addict or something in the last year or two?
What also shocked me about Jordan was that he was apparently promoting the nonsense that the Jewish IQ is a full SD—15 points—above the white American average, which is just totally absurd. He was also apparently totally unaware of my big Meritocracy article from 2012, even though it got very substantial MSM coverage and was actually ranked as probably the best magazine article of the year by both David Brooks of the NYT and also a top editor at The Economist.
Peterson is a psychology professor and being so totally ignorant of his own subject-area is just appalling.
http://comicartcommunity.com/gallery/data/media/885/TUROK_SON_OF_STONE_1.jpg
Lots of people take that idiot seriously, and it drives me crazy.
I think this is why people are speculating about things like the rise in power of ‘spiteful mutants’ among the elites and the ruling classes, cognitive decline and things like that. It is hard to explain why elites would believe that they can continue to retain their elite status without a reasonably stable and cohesive country behind them.
Another possibility is that some of them have actually come to believe in Neo-Marxist ideas about fostering social change by focusing on social tensions and contradictions, with the general goal of ‘advancing the dialectic’. This seems at least possible in the US.
Finally, I believe with some of the Western European elites it is hard to rule out a Michel Houellebecq Soumission style scenario developing, where they try to integrate themselves with elites from rising countries from the former developing world (in Britain, India and Nigeria as possibilities, in France, North Africa).
One of the more bizarre or original features of Social Justice politics is that the leaders of the new Red Guard are likely to be drawn from the children of the elite, because the elite have positioned themselves as the revolutionary vanguard of the oppressed, while the lower middle and working classes are now the oppressor class.
Speculating about this kind of thing is quite addictive.
Jordan Peterson initially became famous because of his anti-SJW rants and after that he became a self-help guru.
This comment and the other one about never having read a single article of Scott Alexander is the most surprising thing I’ve read all week.
For a guy that runs a weird corner of the internet that is unz.com you would think that other places of the “intellectual dark web” would be known to you.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcStoi8W2qYyyHsbYYVrmdvEtRMM_1E_c8MhZg&usqp=CAU
This is all of us. The internet is huge. To look at .1% of it is to drink from a firehose.
Scott Aaronson, the computer scientist, once said unironically that to many of his readers, and to himself, Scott Alexander deleting his blog would be like Mark Twain burning all his works.
So Alexander’s readers (including Aaronson) are silly. Perhaps appropriate for a psychiatrist. At least to my knowledge no one has implied that you deleting your website here would be anywhere near such a tragic loss, making Unz Review readers possibly significantly saner than Slate Star Codex readers.
Trump imposing tariffs on China was a long overdue correction to a decades-long folly by American elites. But he was a protectionist, not a warmonger. Team Biden is more likely to gin up a Cold War with China, which, given their incompetence, may lead to a hot war.
https://twitter.com/acczibit/status/1344747663703617537?s=20
Not sure who the pied piper you’re referring to is.
Trump’s policies don’t represent the new consensus.
Biden already reversed Trump’s cancelation of Critical Race Theory struggle sessions in the federal government and is reversing Trump’s immigration polices.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1357450743461068804?s=20
The strategy was for American capitalists to make money from trade with China and perhaps control over the Chinese economy
Not as much controlling the PRC economy as weaken the hold of the CPC on China.
https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clintons_Speech_on_China_Trade_Bi.htm
Well, I dug up the big NYT article from last week and wasn’t very impressed. Apparently, lots of Tech people are quite impressed with Alexander’s blathering, but this relates to a point I made a year or two ago:
https://www.unz.com/runz/an-open-letter-to-the-alt-right-and-others/
For example, during the BLM controversy a few months ago Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who’s worth $5 billion, donated $10 million to a dim-witted pseudo-intellectual black guy named Ibram X. Kendi best known for publishing some book denouncing racism. The Tech people in Alexander’s circle are obviously much more rightwingers/libertarians, but perhaps not hugely more sophisticated in their politics.
Just to be fair to Alexander, I decided to take another look at his Top Posts list, and clicked on the #1 item, which turned out to be a windy analysis of Minimum Wage issues published in 2014.
Now as it happens, earlier that same year I’d launched America’s current national MW movement, including op-eds in the NYT, the LA Times, Forbes, and numerous other publications, and with a big NYT article covering my project. There had also been various front-page stories in Bay Area newspapers, presumably the reason he decided to write about it. But his 2,500 word piece—which he ranked #1 on all-time Top list—seemed so vacuous and “philosophical” I just skimmed it. Basically, a piece on MW issues written by some random psychiatrist-blogger who doesn’t know anything about MW issues and isn’t trying to investigate them.
I think the first time I’d ever heard of the “intellectual dark web” was a few years ago when they were given a big cover story in the NYT Magazine, but it didn’t provide any details on anything interesting they’d ever said or done. I got the sense they focused on “edgy” things like gingering suggesting that men might be slightly taller than women. Around the same time, David Brooks described Jordan Peterson as America’s most important public intellectual, though I’d never heard of him, he didn’t seem to say or know anything, and a year or two later he became a drug-addict. Not exactly a true successor to a James Q. Wilson or a Nathan Glazer.
Someone upthread claimed their longest written work was 500,000 words of Harry Potter fanfic.
Perhaps one reason I’ve barely even heard of the “intellectual dark web” people is that they’ve never said anything I’d find interesting or important.
Never heard of Yudkowsky and ‘the rationalist movement’. Did some search and the picture that emerged is that Yudkowsky is clearly a charlatan in the process of forming a profitable cult like movement and organization targeting Silicon Valley not dissimilar from the L. Ron Hubbard strategy of targeting Hollywood or Ayn Rand targeting NYC intelligentsia orphaned by Trotsky and Stalin deaths. That’s were the money is. Yudkowsky gets funding from techno-libertarianism like Peter Thiel. While Hanson is with Mason University that is generously funded by Koch brothers.
Yudkowsky in his youth during the dot-com bubble allegedly did some coding hoping to get rich. But it came to nothing.
He has never completed any tangible project. He discovered that he was a better talker than doer. He realized he could persuade other people to fund him.
His Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is funded by Open Philanthropy ($3-$4 mil per year). His Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is funded by Open Philanthropy ($500k), Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative ($300k) and others.
Then there are LessWrong, Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC) and European Summer Program on Rationality (ESPR) that are funded separately.
He does what libertarians always do for plutocracy and oligarchy:
The incident of Roko’s Basilisk exemplify the best the absurdity of Yudovsky’s intellectual universe:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#cite_note-61
Apparently the Roko’s Basilisk incident alienated “the head choppers” fellow cryonicists which are somewhere there in the bizarre constellation of libertarian transhumanists.
One good thing is that now I understand better where AK was coming from when I have encountered him here at the UR and I am hoping that he grew out of that nonsense.
I don’t know if your second paragraph is true or not, but if it is, where’s the contradiction? Men put up with all kinds of [fill in the blank] from women, it has little bearing on their intellectual value. The alternative is often… https://imgur.com/a/NoQ9XXR
An analysis of prevalence of autism amongst fans of Scott Alexander and Elizier Yudkowsky and Jordan Peterson might be revealing. On a podcast early last year Tyler Cowen and Eric Weinstein proclaimed Scott as the most important public intellectual in the country. Exactly as Brooks and Peterson.
They have a rabid fan base. Probably not the kind of fan base anybody would want. Remember the Saturday Night Live skit with William Shatner and the Star Trek fans and him yelling at them to “Get a life”?
A fan base like that.
Yet Scott gave me the inside dope on amphetamines in Silicon Valley and the Big Yud entertained me with Roko’s Baselisk, the shangri-la diet, and math pets. And they never did anything to harm me. Also and I have this handy diagnostic on people to be avoided absolutely with extreme prejudice. I consider these free gifts. As Yogi Berra said “you can observe a lot just by watching.”
I agree that the SV people are not very knowledgeable, but to be fair to them, they have their heads buried in their computers trying to make as much money as they can, as you yourself once did. I like Jordan Peterson more than you, having actually watched many hours of his videos like this BBC interview that went viral for the rank duplicity of his interviewer, and I think the attraction is that in a developed West that has all the material wealth needed for a comfortable life but stripped of moral or spiritual guidance of any kind with the debasement and death of religion, he has taken on a role of a mass father figure with his online video lectures and books.
While much of what he says is blandly obvious (“Clean your room” is a famous saying), there are many who need it said and he represents the male patriarchy to the Woke left so they have marked him for destruction, as one of the few self-described liberals rebeling against their Woke edicts (he first got famous for calling the Canadian law that forced him to refer to trans people by their preferred pronoun a bad law that he wouldn’t follow, which got him labeled anti-trans even though he said it wasn’t about them and he was only against such laws abridging free speech). He is important in that he wades forcefully and thoughtfully into the culture wars, not in that he has anything ground-breaking to say.
As for the IDW, there is a heavy jewish flavor to it, so one wonders what their connection is to the neocons. It could be a false front by them as they largely attack the Woke left, who also have significant overlap with the BDS crowd. One senses that the media uses them to enforce the edge of their Overton window, highlighting them as the edge of “respectable” discussion and occasionally sacrificing one, perhaps Scott here, to show the punushment coming if you go over the edge they’ve defined, even when you do so anonymously.
Jordan Peterson wrote a book twenty-odd years ago called Maps of Meaning. I read a little of this book online, and it seemed clear to me that Peterson had considerable mental health problems, based on his own account of his college years and early adulthood.
Peterson seems competent or perhaps excellent in his area of expertise, but (like Steven Pinker) is out of his depth when discussing other subjects. I believe that Peterson’s current notoriety stems from his refusal to use gender pronouns when interacting with a student, which created a minor ruckus on campus, which then became a wider controversy.
Elizier Yudkowsky is a typical AI hypester. We’ve been promised AI since the 1950’s and I don’t think we’re going to see it anytime soon. This current wave of AI is based on deep neuro-nets. Instead of having two or three layers, these neuro nets have 8-10 layers, sometimes more, and are “trained” (repetitive pattern recognition tests and “pruning” of the node connections that are not used much). As you might guess, the best application for this technology would be machine vision. Yet, Cognex, the 800 gorilla of machine vision, has barely rolled out machine vision products based on this technology. Deep neuro nets require a LOT of computing power (rack mounted hardware).
A little background for you: Deep neuronets were actually invented in 1986! I remember hearing about this at the time because this was the year I found myself in the whole transhumanist milieu of SoCal at the time. However, they were not implemented at the time because computing hardware was simply not capable enough (deep neuro nets are computationally intensive) at time. It was only around 2010 or so that the computing hardware had developed to the point that people could start working with deep neuro nets. So, all of the “current” AI hype is based on a technology invented more than 30 years ago. This should tell you something as the “next” technology for AI has yet to be developed, AND Moore’s Law is reaching its limits as semiconductor scaling is now reaching the molecular level. If the same timeline holds true, then assuming the “next” AI technology, comparable to deep neuro nets, gets developed, we’re looking at another potential 30 years for it to actually be developed.
This is why we’re entering another AI “winter”.
Hmmm… It does really sound a little like one of those fraudulent, cult-like “Jewish intellectual movements” that Kevin MacDonald’s writings have heavily documented.
I think I debated Cowen on NPR regarding my Minimum Wage proposal in 2014, and pretty clearly crushed him. In fact, given his ideological framework, I think he called my effective political strategy “diabolical” in one of his columns.
I had also demolished his close colleague Bryan Caplan in a televised NYC debate a few months earlier, with his “open borders” views being so manifestly ridiculous that even his debate-partner admitted they were absurd:
https://www.unz.com/runz/open-borders-american-elites-and-the-minimum-wage/
I don’t know anything about Weinstein, but I’d probably consider Cowen’s endorsement a negative indicator.
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What is different is that Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky comes from Orthodox community so he is openly Jewish w/o attempts of crypsis unlike some of leaders of the past movements that Kevin MacDonald analyzed.
It seems that his younger brother Yehuda committed suicide in 2004:
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/947781711659655169
Glancing at names of staff members of his organizations I would say they are about 50% Jewish.
Possibly a relative of Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Would AIPAC AI be a thread to humanity? What Eliezer Yudkowsky would say?
Here is an article by Joshua Fox:
“I don’t know anything about Weinstein” – He is the next Einstein or so he claims.
Cocktail Party Physics by Jennifer Ouellette on May 24, 2013
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/dear-guardian-youve-been-played/
A number of people have been privately asking me about the recent Guardian article (and accompanying Op-Ed by Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy) gushing over a supposedly revolutionary new unified theory of physics by a man who officially left academia 20 years ago. Or, as I’ve taken to calling it, Eric Weinstein’s Amazing New Theory That Solves Every Puzzling Conundrum in Theoretical Physics Only He Hasn’t Written An Actual Paper Yet So Physicists Can’t Check All Those Hard Mathematical Details But Trust Us, It’s Gonna Be Awesome!
Fair enough.
Also, you’ve got it completely wrong on Peterson. His message isn’t interesting or important to you, because his message isn’t for you or any other high status Ivy Leaguer-millionaire-businessman.
Presumably you publish your opinions on the Minimum Wage, not because you are pining to land a job, but rather you care about society in general and would benefit indirectly from a well functioning one.
Peterson’s message is for lost, disaffected, depressed, young men in a world increasing hostile to merit. In an age where prestige media is telling young black men that they have no agency over their actions, Peterson is teaching young men to be truthful and to take responsibility for oneself, instead of being angry and looking to blame others.
The affluent class has a really hard time of figuring out what’s actually good for the working class. So when they see advice like, clean your room and stand up straight, they just don’t see what the fuss is about, oblivious to the fact the working class don’t have Fathers in the household.
Instead of dismissing Peterson we should be thanking him. It’s hard to fault you for not seeing Peterson’s value, as you are simply too far removed from the target audience of non high status young men.
Sure, he sounds like a perfectly reasonable self-help guru, though the fact that he supposedly used his inflow of sudden cash to become a drug-addict might somewhat detract from his message.
But when I tried listening to one of his most leading talks a couple of years ago, he didn’t seem to know anything about the subject in question, so I just question David Brooks’ claiming that he had become America’s most important public “intellectual.”
I clicked a couple of those links, and they were totally devastating…
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23632-how-to-test-weinsteins-provocative-theory-of-everything/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23595-weinsteins-theory-of-everything-is-probably-nothing/
All the articles about Weinstein’s “breakthrough” were from eight years ago, and since I’ve never since heard anything about them since, the whole thing must have been nonsense.
Offhand, since Weinstein left physics almost thirty years ago but works at a hedge fund, it sounds like he just bribed Oxford to let him give a vanity-talk, which greatly irritated the actual physicists there. Jeffrey Epstein was a college drop-out, but I think he paid many millions to Harvard and MIT so he could pretend he had a legitimate connection with those institutions.
The whole thing sounds totally in keeping with that big NYT article about Scott Alexander and his circle of allies, who regard Alexander as America’s foremost “public intellectual.”
Weinstein knew Epstein and was at his house in 2003/2004
Peterson tirelessly promotes the Big 5 Personality Model. This is a creation of Defense Intelligence research projects explicitly designed for controlling populations. Like those disaffected depressed young men.
Peterson isn’t just of mediocre competence. He also is a hypocrite.
One difference between the two is probably worth noting. Jordan Peterson is pretty transparently a grifter. I’m not sure that’s true of Scott Alexander.
I think there’s some truth to what you’re saying, but after a point it’s still pretty surprising. I can’t think of anyone else who better exemplifies a contrast between sober, cogent writing and nutso degenerate (but in a pathetic way) personal life, which he was unashamed to discuss.
https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1362668232029573120
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1363663668416704512
https://twitter.com/DrugGovoruna/status/1363675092740284419
https://twitter.com/InfraredArmy/status/1363678084466106369
https://twitter.com/InfraredArmy/status/1363678824546902016
I was a reader of and commented on Scott Alexander’s blog as was your Steve Sailer. I don’t think many of his readers would describe him as a public intellectual. However, you underestimate him and the “rationalist” community, I suspect.
Weinstein claims that he will release a standard paper about his ideas on the near future. Perhaps I am wrong, but I was under the impression Weinstein was trained as a mathematician, not a physicist.
You have a superficial impression of Yudkowsky. You should spend more time interacting with Rationalists and the AI alignment theories Yudkowsky has helped develop.
Well, I don’t know anything about the Weinstein fellow, but according to those articles someone linked upthread, about seven or eight years ago, he claimed to have already developed a revolutionary theory unifying all of modern physics or something. But although he apparently paid some PR people to get a big story about his breakthrough into the front-pages of the British newspapers at the time, he said his theory was still “secret” and he couldn’t show it to anyone. When some actual physicists asked him a few very basic questions, he didn’t have any answers.
Eight years have now gone by, and you say he’s now planning to release his paper “in the near future.”
Maybe. And maybe the QAnon people are also correct and Donald Trump is about to implement his secret plan to arrest all the Democrats and put the Satanic pedophile cannibals out of business.
https://twitter.com/FluorescentGrey/status/1365008922377998337
You might find this interesting.
You may be right. When I watch him, though, my charlatan alarms don’t go off. I’m not saying I believe he has a revolutionary theory that’s correct, but maybe he thinks he does.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ifX_JnBfxTY
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/03/guest-post-problems-with-eric.html