Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2016–2025years
40% recommend40% neutral20% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41198053-neoreaction-a-b...
- yeah - I think it's fully explained by a virulent plague of memetic brain worms, and doesn't need a conspiracy. I recommend Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer to get a handle on it (and not just because my name's in the first sentence).
- 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 would like to begin by stressing how deeply miserable I am to be back on this beat. [...] Since people seem to love pointing out that Neoreaction a Basilisk does not actually talk about Scott Siskind, aka Scott Alexander, here’s another goddamn essay.
The author certainly didn’t owe anyone another article, but it would be nice if there was a point to it beyond pointing out Scott’s obvious and consistent reluctance to reach falsifiable conclusions or express more than weakly held opinions.
Isn’t all philosophical writing, good or bad, vague?
- > This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.
See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work.
For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet).
Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad as a universal principle, a visceral belief. (in http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... )
The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos.
(Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)
