feotakahari | (no subject)

My actual problem with the Rationalist community is that someone like Kontextmaschine or Voxette-VK gets reblogged all the time for their “insightful posts,” and then they post something abhorrent about how it’s right for some people to subjugate or exterminate other people, and then they keep getting reblogged and no one ever mentions it again. It’s like, am I the only one who remembers that they said that? Doesn’t anyone else think those comments give some insight into the real reasons behind their other opinions about things like government intervention or disability pay?

Weirdly, the one person who consistently gets held to task for awful posts is Scott Alexander, and I have no idea what makes him different. People complain about Eliezer Yudkowsky, but more in terms of finding him cringy than in terms of disliking his opinions. There’s also Communists who aren’t Rationalists, get called out once by Rationalists for the exact same awful takes as these Rationalist authoritarians, and then never get brought up again because Rationalists aren’t into Communism much.

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ok WHAT THE FAAAAAAAAAAAK

Apparently, this is one Tumblr subculture that I managed to miss out on.

It sucks because all of the Utilitarians I find on Tumblr are Rationalists. Even if I follow the people who are okay, I get to see them interact with the people who are terrible. (I suppose it’s like Kpop and antis.)

With Scott Alexander I suspect it's tall poppy syndrome: he's a somewhat big name and that just naturally makes him an obvious target for criticism, and also he's famous enough that his writings find their way to people who don't see him as part of their in-group. I suspect the specific issue you're talking about here has a lot to do with in-group bias: people just naturally tend to be more charitable toward people they see as "one of my people," you can see it happening all over the political spectrum.

In general, I think the rationalist subculture is Like That because:

1) It grew out of that early '00s nerd culture where being a libertarian was cool.

2) It's full of people with a history of a particular kind of childhood trauma; that of being a "book-smart" but socially unpopular bullied child. That experience naturally tends to create a feeling that normal people are aliens, inferiors, and threats. Worse, when I was a "book-smart" but unpopular teenager in the late '90s and early '00s the most accessible "it gets better" narrative I had was "my peers hate me because they're jealous of my intellectual superiority, but when I grow up I'll be rich cause I'm smart and my abusers will be bagging my groceries and cleaning my toilet," and I suspect that was a common experience for "book-smart" but unpopular/bullied children/teenagers in the late '90s and early '00s (I hope it's gotten better since, I have reasons to think it might have but I don't know). I suspect a lot of people in rationalist subculture had childhood experiences something like mine and it really shows in their attitudes toward people who remind them of the people who abused them when they were children/teenagers.

Also I'd say something about class interests and it being full of relatively privileged laborers such as computer programmers, but that's a predictable take so I won't bother saying anything more about it.

I wonder if the tumblr design helps that along? Instead of a sense of continuity, you just have posts that get reblogged a bunch, and the worse stuff gets buried and easily lost.

I mean, people also can be contributing to it for sure. <_< But if all you know about a person is through other people's reblogs of it, it's pretty possible to only know their "greatest hits" and not realize what else they're posting. --Sneak

I have a tendency to wiki-walk in social media, and it seems like most people don’t do that. E.g. if someone I like makes an interesting post, and it’s a reply to what Voxette said, I go look at Voxette’s blog and see if they’re involved in other interesting discussions. That helps me find interesting stuff sometimes, but it also digs up a lot of TERFs and such. I guess you’re right that if you don’t wiki-walk, you have no idea who these people are.

Yeah, we do the Wiki-walk too, sometimes! (Though we quit with tumblr because it was a really fandom-heavy space, and we get oversaturated with that stuff really fast.) But I can see how someone who's only interested in posts about a narrow subject don't end up wading through someone's full profile. (Especially if they're like... I don't know, 90% memes, 5% philosophy, 1% the subject you care about.)

--Sneak