Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza

Weird Internet Communities

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dubsartur:
I am wondering whether to give in and do a newspaper-clippings-and-ball-of-string map to show the connections between the American Rationalists, American or Right Libertarians, Effective Altruism, 'human biodiversity' (sic), neoreaction, and the American pundit-economists with blogs (plus a few figures with lives and influence off the Internet such as Steven Pinker and Peter Thiel).  I am so not surprised to learn that the rationalists started writing Harry Potter fanfic and ended up shilling the FTX ponzi scheme.

A lot of effort has been put in to spread these ideas in the California and New York tech spaces.  This Tumblr post is not bad but does not get into the 'scientific' racism or the connections with economists with a PhD and a blog or a newspaper column https://leviathan-supersystem.tumblr.com/post/180724263214/what-is-lesswrong-and-can-you-summarize-why-its (This RationalWiki entry is not bad on them and race theories but focused on one prominent figure rather than the faction within that space which likes to cite Razib Khan and has racist cranks posting in their comments).  OTOH, you can waste your life documenting people on the Internet who push terrible ideas or terrible people.

Edit: thinky professional centre-left mag Vox discovered neoreaction a few weeks ago https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug It also fails to draw the whole network of connections (S. Alexander and R. Hanson are not just "ideas bloggers" but part of specific subcultures where there is sympathy for neoreaction).

Edit: also, back in the Before Times, Dominic Cummings' blog seemed to be drawing on some of these communities (although I don't remember any sign that they noticed him).

Edit: Back in the Internet Feminism Wars of the early 2010s, a famous rationalist blogger wrote an essay with an infamous paragraph comparing feminists to Voldemort.  I am told that was a response to an essay by journalist Laurie Penny who went on to skewer cryptocurrency scammers!  So this is a tiny tiny space with dense connections and far too much public drama.  (Which is one reason why descriptions of these spaces are cluttered with personal attacks and misleading insinuations).

David Gerard cites the following two posts as early attempts to move 'race science' into rationalist discourse

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould

He mentions someone called Aella who I never heard of.

Edit: someone spelled out Cummings' connections to the rationalist movement without being quoted on their connections to shady and not just weird ideas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/demis-hassabis-the-deep-mind-dominic-cummings-turned-to-as-the-pandemic-hit


--- Quote ---as well as being a generally respected scientist, (Cummings advisor Dr. Denis) Hassabis is linked to the rationalist movement, which has guided much of Cummings’ thinking.

“We know that Dom is rationalist-influenced from his own blogroll and comments,” says Tom Chivers, author of a book on the movement, The AI Does Not Hate You. While Hassabis is not himself a member of the community, his involvement in advanced AI research brings him into the same circles.

“What rationalism implies from a policy perspective is a big question,” Chivers says, “but you can see something like it in the effective altruist mode of thinking: trying to separate emotional responses from outcomes. And, by extension, it can lead to serious thought about long-term existential risks, AI and bio-terror, because they have the potential to crush human flourishing in the long term.”
--- End quote ---

dubsartur:
A blogger in Australia has also noticed that figures and tropes from the Social Media Right from the early 2010s are being talked about again.  Two people tried to restart the Internet Feminism Wars from that period with me in the past week, and I am sorry but I won't touch that with a dragonlance.

Jubal:
I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.

I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.

dubsartur:

--- Quote from: Jubal on November 29, 2022, 11:17:42 PM ---I guess my view with some of this weird Very Online Politics stuff is that I think it's maybe worth working back to it from anything with hitting power (politicians, tech barons, mass media, etc) that it might have influenced, but probably not forward from it starting with it as a core premise. So I think the Cummings or Thiel connection might have some interest as a product of this milieu and its influence on wider society, more than the milieu is per se interesting in and of itself for example.

I never really know if I should learn more about some of this stuff: I suspect it might be information my brain doesn't actually need, in that I'm not sure what I'd usefully do with it if I did know how some of these groups fitted together? My interest in politics is a fairly practical (or at least policy-level) one, and I don't think my own political movement (here meaning "the UK tradition of radical liberalism") has been all that drastically influenced by the weirder end of blogosphere currents.

--- End quote ---
One thing I noticed is that some American spaces in the 2010s which proudly stated that they were focusing on politics because that was much more important than geekery didn't seem to start acting on politics.  They just kept talking about politics online and yelling at people who had hurting wrong labels.  But to do electoral politics, you need to build coalitions with people you are different from around common interests!  And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.

I would also respectfully suggest that many of these figures have serious hitting power in the form of a receptive audience of thousands of professionals, many of whom build and maintain New Media systems.  The average racist with logorhea does not count, but S. Alexander probably does, so so many of the pundit-economists such as Yglesias.

I agree that if you try to learn about these spaces and their influence you will hear far more than you want to hear about who bedded whom, who snubbed whom on Tumblr, etc.  The RationalWiki article I linked has that problem, so do David Gerard's birdsite posts.  And many of these people's most notable achievement is writing or talking endlessly online.

Jubal:

--- Quote ---And those coalitions have to be built around electoral districts, not weird global ideologies.
--- End quote ---
In fairness this is most true in the Anglosphere: you can have a much more ideologically-driven coalition in theory in a lot of other countries, though there are limits to that (one of the reasons that the Austrian right-liberal NEOS never gets above ten or twelve percent is that it's not socially conservative enough for the conservatives but anyone on the left thinks their economic policies are absolutely nuts.)

I guess I agree that pundits like Yglesias do have a meaningful amount of power, but I do wonder how much: their political preferences aren't terribly well represented in actual policy or electoral results, as far as I can tell. Though maybe their professional-leaning and media-type audiences do mean they have outsize narrative power or possibly outsize financial power or executive power over all the bits of government nobody really looks at much (they might concievably reach and influence a much higher percentage of political donors or special advisors than voters).

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