I used to hang out pretty regularly at one of those named group houses that serves as a salon / regular party spot, which was popular with the rationalist crowd and a variety of techies. I don't know Eliezer super well, but I met him several times there, and I realized after Scott released his name that I have met him as well (but didn't know who he was, at the time).
Eliezer is decidedly left-leaning socially, moderate economically. The idea that he would endorse "fascism" is pretty much loony. Scott is I think a bit more conservative in some pragmatic sense -- he seems to be at least open to the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle. But he also is clearly _opposed_ to the neo-reactionary types who want to achieve that kind of vision of conservative lifestyles by way of violently repressing those who disagree. Maybe you think it's bad that he will engage with those neo-reactionary types via polite conversation; maybe you think all Nazis need punching, and buy into the "paradox of tolerance" idea that for people whose end goal is intolerant, we can't try to just reason with them. But for the Times author to tar Scott as a right-winger like Thiel is a deep misreading of his arguments. I'm sure I disagree with him about a number of things, but I respect that he has a deep reverence for the value and autonomy of each human being.
Thanks for the article! Do you think it's still correct to assume that Scott Alexander is a conservative, given that he's a self described Warren-Biden voter? Or are you basing that inference more on a large body of his writing than recent voting patterns?
Reminds me of the surprisingly boring New Yorker article by Anna Weiner article about Hacker News from a while back, which painted the site as a cesspit of sexism and racism. In reality, its mostly just nerds arguing about functional programming, but that's not the narrative that the New York literary establishment wants to read.
It's very hard to read this outside of the weird emerging culture war between Tech and Tech Journalism — c.f. the weird recent moral panics about Clubhouse. There seems to be a constituency of journalists who are clearly suspicious of pretty much any online space that operates under a different set of moral values than their own, while the anti-journo tech-adjacent world thinks the Times just hates free thinkers who actually make things. So maximum amount of bad faith is assumed, and, because this is the internet, everyone calls each other secret fascists.
"As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago"
I cannot remember seeing a single self-identified Nazi ever posting on the blog, although there was at least one communist and is one Marxist. Can you offer examples?
Or are you using "Nazi" to mean anyone who doesn't accept large parts of the current left orthodoxy? There were certainly lots of people who fit that description.
I'd say Scott is a conservative in the sense that sometimes, he timidly puts out a hand in the path of history and mutters: "Hey guys. Can we like, talk about this a bit more first please?"
And your description of the rationalist community is pretty spot on. I find some of its esoterica interesting which keeps me coming back to it. But politics is not commonly a topic of conversation except for despair at the poor incentives political actors tend to face and some fun engaging in prediction markets.
Also, really glad this episode led me to your substack. I liked your blog back in the days and I'm happy you're still around.
This also just acadonte, but I help run an effective altruist group at a British university and I'd have said the people there are further to the left than the average uni student at a UK top 10 uni, i.e very very left wing by normal people standards.
I have lived and been active in the front lines in SV for 20+ years and I can tell everyone that Noah Smith is right on mark here. There is no facism developing but there is a growing pocket of centrists developing.
I think this was an astute piece - the NYT sucks at representing the Best Coast in general. Things to think about:
- It's worth watching movements that are harmful when they're small when they might grow larger. Imagine expressing concern in 2008 that 4chan would end up being a destabilizing factor for the oldest democracy on the planet - you'd get laughed out of any newsroom. Here we are. I could have told you that the style and speed of communication being engendered by said website was spreading quickly, and I was 19.
- I think few of the rationalists themselves were openly Silicon Valley people. The two that I used to read obsessively were Slate Star Codex and Gene Expression, written by a Jewish-American psychiatrist from California and a Bangladeshi-American geneticist who grew up in Oregon and now is in Texas, for what it's worth. Neither techies. In retrospect the entire Rationalist blog network (including Brad DeLong) was good on democratizing academic discussion and expertise and intensely naïve about politics - it seemed to be assumed that the US would settle into a left/libertarian multicultural détente, when we've actually seen a younger young millennial/Gen Z group that is heavily minority and enraged at the moral and economic ruin they've inherited (wokes), older whites that are worried that the homogeneity of their racial and economic world is going away (Trumpies) and everyone else caught somewhere between them.
- Banning Nazis is a good idea. I have been through a lot of fun Slate Star Codex threads that become a lot less fun when Steve Sailer shows up.
I have some experience with people from the various spheres involved. The average bay area Rationalist type is socially liberal in certain respects, supports government benefits but dislikes regulation of tech etc. This is also a tiny community and not that important, as you say. Although their fake research institute gets a lot of funding. The only politically important person who you could remotely call Rationalist is Dominic Cummings, who may not be politically important any longer.
Scott came up from the Rationalist community but most of his audience don't describe themselves as Rationalist. I think you strongly underestimate his reach. His subreddit, r/slatestarcodex, has 40k subscribers, and its offshoot, r/theMotte has 14k. Most people who read some of his work probably haven't subscribed to this subreddit, and might just read articles they find through HackerNews or something, so there are probably many more people who know who he is. There's no incentive for substack to pay a pre-agreed upon large salary to a guy with a tiny readership.
These subreddits have drifted further and further right, and have contributed to the radicalization of people who join them (have seen people from there admit to this). The whole reason r/theMotte was made was because Scott didn't want the kind of content appearing in their "culture war discussions" to be officially associated with him anymore, but he still recommends people go there etc.). After Scott said he'd talk less about "culture war" related issues, a lot of people from his subreddits got angry with him because that's what they primarily liked him for.
The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits. This isn't really that different from Hacker News or what the various chans have become these days, except that it's more socially acceptable to talk about. This phenomenon isn't really a consequence of his ideological views, although it's worth noting he hasn't really done anything to stop it.
As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future. If you're interested, you should actually read most of the things he says about hereditarianism, and look at his interactions with Emil Kierkegaard etc, which I'm sure are archived by some fans of his. Whether or not this makes him "right wing" is none of my business but it's something I'm rather concerned about given his reach.
I'm going to have to disagree. Not just Thiel, and Ton-That, and Yudkowski. They might be the minority in numbers, but they have outsised influence relative to their numbers. And they're changing the culture. After decades of grubby little pamphlets like Unz and VDARE, this ideology is taking hold and it's because of tech. Also, that liberal/conservative bar graph is meaningless and I'm surprised you posted it. You can believe in climate change, welfare, be an atheist, gun control, abortion, gay marriage, even unions and socialism. It doesn't matter. Believing black people and women are genetically inferior is like multiplying by zero. It wipes out everything else on the list. They'e standard liberal nerds with ONE VERY BIG DIFFERENCE.
And even if most of Silicon Valley doesn't overtly agree with Thiel and Siskind, they're the type to lead the culture. Look how fast same sex marriage went from a fringe weirdo SJW cause, to the accepted law of the land. They're thought leaders. This is early. Besides, I bet Silicon Valley hates "Social justice warriors" "woke" "cancellers" etc far more than they hate Siskind and Thiel (and Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Quillette and Noah Carl and half Joe Rogan's guests).
All I want to say is that while people like Peter Leyden makes me (a bog standard liberal and minority) want to vote Democratic, people like SDG makes me want to vote for the first non-fascist non-racist Republican that comes along.
A lot of guilt by association going on in the NYT article. You cannot judge someone's opinions by the commenters on their blog. There is always a substantial number of contrarians and outright trolls. Just last week Matt Yglesias's substack had a commentator who was clearly promoting, to be kind, race realist ideas. Yglesias was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, clearly not having spent enough time in comment sections to recognize the type as well as his readers had.
It’s really not fair to hold commenters against the writer. All commenters are, after all, ill informed assholes. :) (My apologies to Epimenides of Crete)
Nazis, fascists, far-right... all those terms are flung left and right while being devoid of substance. Instead of calling people names or asking them to identify themselves I find it much easier to ask this one quesiton:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
"I’ve never heard them use Slate Star Codex jargon."
I doubt this is strictly true. At least one piece of SSC jargon has gained widespread use: "motte and bailey." Sure, sure, it's an older term by a philosopher.
I used to hang out pretty regularly at one of those named group houses that serves as a salon / regular party spot, which was popular with the rationalist crowd and a variety of techies. I don't know Eliezer super well, but I met him several times there, and I realized after Scott released his name that I have met him as well (but didn't know who he was, at the time).
Eliezer is decidedly left-leaning socially, moderate economically. The idea that he would endorse "fascism" is pretty much loony. Scott is I think a bit more conservative in some pragmatic sense -- he seems to be at least open to the idea that "the good life" for many people involves a world that rescues them from the pains of the "paradox of choice" by circumscribing a lot of options, and pushing them into more of a traditional lifestyle. But he also is clearly _opposed_ to the neo-reactionary types who want to achieve that kind of vision of conservative lifestyles by way of violently repressing those who disagree. Maybe you think it's bad that he will engage with those neo-reactionary types via polite conversation; maybe you think all Nazis need punching, and buy into the "paradox of tolerance" idea that for people whose end goal is intolerant, we can't try to just reason with them. But for the Times author to tar Scott as a right-winger like Thiel is a deep misreading of his arguments. I'm sure I disagree with him about a number of things, but I respect that he has a deep reverence for the value and autonomy of each human being.
Thanks for the article! Do you think it's still correct to assume that Scott Alexander is a conservative, given that he's a self described Warren-Biden voter? Or are you basing that inference more on a large body of his writing than recent voting patterns?
Reminds me of the surprisingly boring New Yorker article by Anna Weiner article about Hacker News from a while back, which painted the site as a cesspit of sexism and racism. In reality, its mostly just nerds arguing about functional programming, but that's not the narrative that the New York literary establishment wants to read.
It's very hard to read this outside of the weird emerging culture war between Tech and Tech Journalism — c.f. the weird recent moral panics about Clubhouse. There seems to be a constituency of journalists who are clearly suspicious of pretty much any online space that operates under a different set of moral values than their own, while the anti-journo tech-adjacent world thinks the Times just hates free thinkers who actually make things. So maximum amount of bad faith is assumed, and, because this is the internet, everyone calls each other secret fascists.
"As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago"
I cannot remember seeing a single self-identified Nazi ever posting on the blog, although there was at least one communist and is one Marxist. Can you offer examples?
Or are you using "Nazi" to mean anyone who doesn't accept large parts of the current left orthodoxy? There were certainly lots of people who fit that description.
I'd say Scott is a conservative in the sense that sometimes, he timidly puts out a hand in the path of history and mutters: "Hey guys. Can we like, talk about this a bit more first please?"
And your description of the rationalist community is pretty spot on. I find some of its esoterica interesting which keeps me coming back to it. But politics is not commonly a topic of conversation except for despair at the poor incentives political actors tend to face and some fun engaging in prediction markets.
Also, really glad this episode led me to your substack. I liked your blog back in the days and I'm happy you're still around.
This also just acadonte, but I help run an effective altruist group at a British university and I'd have said the people there are further to the left than the average uni student at a UK top 10 uni, i.e very very left wing by normal people standards.
I have lived and been active in the front lines in SV for 20+ years and I can tell everyone that Noah Smith is right on mark here. There is no facism developing but there is a growing pocket of centrists developing.
I think this was an astute piece - the NYT sucks at representing the Best Coast in general. Things to think about:
- It's worth watching movements that are harmful when they're small when they might grow larger. Imagine expressing concern in 2008 that 4chan would end up being a destabilizing factor for the oldest democracy on the planet - you'd get laughed out of any newsroom. Here we are. I could have told you that the style and speed of communication being engendered by said website was spreading quickly, and I was 19.
- I think few of the rationalists themselves were openly Silicon Valley people. The two that I used to read obsessively were Slate Star Codex and Gene Expression, written by a Jewish-American psychiatrist from California and a Bangladeshi-American geneticist who grew up in Oregon and now is in Texas, for what it's worth. Neither techies. In retrospect the entire Rationalist blog network (including Brad DeLong) was good on democratizing academic discussion and expertise and intensely naïve about politics - it seemed to be assumed that the US would settle into a left/libertarian multicultural détente, when we've actually seen a younger young millennial/Gen Z group that is heavily minority and enraged at the moral and economic ruin they've inherited (wokes), older whites that are worried that the homogeneity of their racial and economic world is going away (Trumpies) and everyone else caught somewhere between them.
- Banning Nazis is a good idea. I have been through a lot of fun Slate Star Codex threads that become a lot less fun when Steve Sailer shows up.
I have some experience with people from the various spheres involved. The average bay area Rationalist type is socially liberal in certain respects, supports government benefits but dislikes regulation of tech etc. This is also a tiny community and not that important, as you say. Although their fake research institute gets a lot of funding. The only politically important person who you could remotely call Rationalist is Dominic Cummings, who may not be politically important any longer.
Scott came up from the Rationalist community but most of his audience don't describe themselves as Rationalist. I think you strongly underestimate his reach. His subreddit, r/slatestarcodex, has 40k subscribers, and its offshoot, r/theMotte has 14k. Most people who read some of his work probably haven't subscribed to this subreddit, and might just read articles they find through HackerNews or something, so there are probably many more people who know who he is. There's no incentive for substack to pay a pre-agreed upon large salary to a guy with a tiny readership.
These subreddits have drifted further and further right, and have contributed to the radicalization of people who join them (have seen people from there admit to this). The whole reason r/theMotte was made was because Scott didn't want the kind of content appearing in their "culture war discussions" to be officially associated with him anymore, but he still recommends people go there etc.). After Scott said he'd talk less about "culture war" related issues, a lot of people from his subreddits got angry with him because that's what they primarily liked him for.
The SSC associated communities actually do provide some sort of "libertarianism to fascism pipeline" where people come in because Scott's criticism of the left resonates with them, and then learn the rest from his comments section and associated subreddits. This isn't really that different from Hacker News or what the various chans have become these days, except that it's more socially acceptable to talk about. This phenomenon isn't really a consequence of his ideological views, although it's worth noting he hasn't really done anything to stop it.
As for the ideology of Scott himself, he's pretty vague about what he believes, but he insists that racial and gender disparities in various contexts are essentially entirely biological in nature. The NYT article does not give good evidence for this. It's hard to find actual receipts now that the old blog is gone and he's probably going to avoid discussing these issues in the future. If you're interested, you should actually read most of the things he says about hereditarianism, and look at his interactions with Emil Kierkegaard etc, which I'm sure are archived by some fans of his. Whether or not this makes him "right wing" is none of my business but it's something I'm rather concerned about given his reach.
I'm going to have to disagree. Not just Thiel, and Ton-That, and Yudkowski. They might be the minority in numbers, but they have outsised influence relative to their numbers. And they're changing the culture. After decades of grubby little pamphlets like Unz and VDARE, this ideology is taking hold and it's because of tech. Also, that liberal/conservative bar graph is meaningless and I'm surprised you posted it. You can believe in climate change, welfare, be an atheist, gun control, abortion, gay marriage, even unions and socialism. It doesn't matter. Believing black people and women are genetically inferior is like multiplying by zero. It wipes out everything else on the list. They'e standard liberal nerds with ONE VERY BIG DIFFERENCE.
And even if most of Silicon Valley doesn't overtly agree with Thiel and Siskind, they're the type to lead the culture. Look how fast same sex marriage went from a fringe weirdo SJW cause, to the accepted law of the land. They're thought leaders. This is early. Besides, I bet Silicon Valley hates "Social justice warriors" "woke" "cancellers" etc far more than they hate Siskind and Thiel (and Jared Taylor and Charles Murray and Quillette and Noah Carl and half Joe Rogan's guests).
All I want to say is that while people like Peter Leyden makes me (a bog standard liberal and minority) want to vote Democratic, people like SDG makes me want to vote for the first non-fascist non-racist Republican that comes along.
A lot of guilt by association going on in the NYT article. You cannot judge someone's opinions by the commenters on their blog. There is always a substantial number of contrarians and outright trolls. Just last week Matt Yglesias's substack had a commentator who was clearly promoting, to be kind, race realist ideas. Yglesias was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, clearly not having spent enough time in comment sections to recognize the type as well as his readers had.
It’s really not fair to hold commenters against the writer. All commenters are, after all, ill informed assholes. :) (My apologies to Epimenides of Crete)
Nazis, fascists, far-right... all those terms are flung left and right while being devoid of substance. Instead of calling people names or asking them to identify themselves I find it much easier to ask this one quesiton:
Yes or no, do you believe that the current social inequalities between black and white people (whether they be in the US or between say Africa and Europe) are partially due to black people being genetically dumber?
"I’ve never heard them use Slate Star Codex jargon."
I doubt this is strictly true. At least one piece of SSC jargon has gained widespread use: "motte and bailey." Sure, sure, it's an older term by a philosopher.
But search twitter for the term. Before July 2014, people using the term were actually talking about castles. After, early adaptors like Megan McArdle, Sam Bowman and other think tank types used it. https://twitter.com/search?q=motte%20Bailey%20filter%3Averified%20until%3A2015-1-1&src=typed_query&f=live
This doesn't quibble with anything you've written, but in terms of influence Scott Alexander punches way above his readership weight.