That's fine :-) It ties in with what I commented above, i.e. conspiracists first assuming that disagreement must be culpable malice.
I already answered #3: the true rejection seems to be not "you are editing about us on Wikipedia to advance RationalWiki at our expense" (which is a complicated and not very plausible claim that would need all its parts demonstrated), but "you are editing about us in a way we don't like".
Someone from the IEET tried to seriously claim (COI Noticeboard and all) that I shouldn't comment on the deletion nomination for their article - I didn't even nominate it, just commented - on the basis that IEET is a 501(c)3 and RationalWiki is also a 5...
despite hearing that one a lot at Rationalwiki, it turns out the big Soros bucks are thinner on the ground than many a valiant truthseeker thinks
Or just what words mean in the context in question, keeping in mind that we are indeed speaking in a particular context.
[here, let me do your homework for you]
In particular, expertise does not constitute a Wikipedia conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest#External_roles_and_relationships
...While editing Wikipedia, an editor's primary role is to further the interests of the encyclopedia. When an external role or relationship could reasonably be said to undermine that primary role, the editor has a conflict of interes
The first two would suggest I'm a subject-matter expert, and particularly the second if the "reliable sources" consistently endorse my stuff, as you observe they do. This suggests I'm viewed as knowing what I'm talking about and should continue. (Be careful your argument makes the argument you think it's making.) The third is that you dislike my opinion, which is fine, but also irrelevant. The final sentence fails to address any WP:RS-related criterion. HTH!
(More generally as a Wikipedia editor I find myself perennially amazed at advocates for some minor cause who seem to seriously think that Wikipedia articles on their minor cause should only be edited by advocates, and that all edits by people who aren't advocates must somehow be wrong and bad and against the rules. Even though the relevant rules are (a) quite simple conceptually (b) say nothing of the sort. You'd almost think they don't have the slightest understanding of what Wikipedia is about, and only cared about advocating their cause and bugger the encyclopedia.)
This isn't what "conflict of interest" means at Wikipedia. You probably want to review WP:COI, and I mean "review" it in a manner where you try to understand what it's getting at rather than looking for loopholes that you think will let you do the antisocial thing you're contemplating. Your posited approach is the same one that didn't work for the cryptocurrency advocates either. (And "RationalWiki is a competing website therefore his edits must be COI" has failed for many cranks, because it's trivially obvious that their tru...
Is any of the following not true?
You are one of the 2 or 3 most vocal critics of LW worldwide, for years, so this is your pet issue, and you are far from impartial.
A lot of what the "reliable sources" write about LW originates from your writing about LW.
You are cherry-picking facts that descibe LW in certain light: For example, you mention that some readers of LW identify as neoreactionaries, but fail to mention that some of them identify as e.g. communists. You keep adding Roko's basilisk as one of the main topics about LW, but remove ment
Yes, but if it's not visible in quality of life, and it's not visible in technological advancement ... what quantity is it detrimental to?
I haven't really seen much discussion on the intersection of neoreaction and transhumanism.
Is there much other than Michael Anissimov's essay?
They're a topic of much past discussion on LW, in fact.
You specifically said he was "hanging around neoreactionaries". It sounds like a quibble, but it's actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that's important.
We have more people living better than ever before in history, and this is because of the Enlightenment.
For a long time, LW was the only place you would read this stuff outside the tiny NRx blogosphere.
I've been advised to come here and defend myself.
If you haven't been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with "frothing" and as "ordure". And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and "actual disgust" to the list of adjectives.
I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.
I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of ...
It's about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you -- to hell with convincing and productive debates.
The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Mo...
Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It's a bias, but at least he is aware of it.
Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert.
NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise.
SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially ...
whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/
Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they're more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say "safe spaces", of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated - so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW's and - plausibly - SSC's goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that's (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.
Your arguments against doing science in this case seem fully general to me. They could be used by anyone promoting their brand of alternative medicine no matter how bizarre their claims would be.
And indeed it turns out they are: this is a pretty standard part of the alternative medicine anti-rationalist toolkit.
Big pharma also has a business model where they can outspend chiropractors by a huge margin when it comes to lobbying and PR to establish memes in society.
Big pharma versus big placebo: one of these is constrained by expectations of evidence, the other to people opposed to joined-up thinking.
Are you seriously claiming the medical opposition to chiropractic is a big pharma conspiracy? If so, do you have actual evidence rather than merely asserting it's possible?
The health store phenomenon you observe (weird alliances) is called "crank magnetism". People who believe one weird thing tend to believe other weird things. (This particularly applies to conspiracy theorists.) Alternative medicine advocates are highly supportive of other alternative therapies that directly contradict their own, because they're of a subculture that defines itself oppositionally. The money flows in to support this weird alliance.
LW's interests do indeed not necessarily hang together, except being things advanced by the transhumani...
It's a really good original story and everyone should read it.
Evidence or speculation? I saw the $300 sell wall, but that does not account for the previous week's dip, which is when the "bearwhale" speculation started. I did see plenty of speculation to this end ... but humans, particularly bagholders in a bubble, will grasp for any explanation that is not "we were foolish".
Really, everything is based on the assumption of conspiracy:
At least with tulip bulbs you can, like, grow tulips.
There are (or were) many, many Bitcoin advocates in the world who can't see it being anything other than deflationary (as there is a limited supply), it does interesting things, etc. Then the world turns around and sends Bitcoins inflationary for this whole year. Empiricism beats praxeology (again).
[tangential] The price of Bitcoin has been dropping significantly in the past few weeks, and dropped below $300 yesterday. I've read many theories as to how this can't happen, but it is. What's going on?
You're seriously raising the notion of testosterone as magical competence juice as an explanation worth taking seriously? This would make teenage males the most competent and convincing people on the planet.
I took the claim to be something different: testosterone is magical confidence juice, and at reasonable levels of competence more confidence leads to greater career success.
I've been desperately in search of a good history as I seek to decrappify the RW article on the topic, which is rather too cobbled-together (and the SJWiki one doesn't even try for a history). So if anyone has something handy ...
(The stereotypical Tumblr SJW phenomenon seems to have escaped academic notice. This actually surprised me when I went looking, given I know how rabid sociology students are in seeking out new subcultural study fodder.)
The cut'n'paste not merely of the opinions, but of the phrasing is the tell that this is undigested. Possibly this could be explained by complete correctness with literary brilliance, but we're talking about one-draft daily blog posts here.
This one from someone going MTF was interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8279058 She found the sexism ridiculously more blatant than transphobia.
Got a link on hand? (I don't disbelieve you, I was wondering how he worded it.)
So why do women do worse in certain fields of work? It turns out you can in fact do a direct A/B comparison on workplace gender discrimination: ask a transgender person. Formerly respected scientist Barbara Barres, now inexplicably-more-respected scientist Ben Barres. Actual quote: "Ben gave a great seminar today—but then his work is so much better than his sister's."
Saying it's a direct A/B comparison is seriously overstating it. Transitioning is itself a huge confounder, and if it were true that time before/after were exactly comparable, that would debunk one of the main justifications for allowing sex-changes in the first place!
...Of course, the sample size is small here. And there’s no perfect agreement on cause-and-effect. Chris Edwards, a trans advertising executive, says that post-transition, he was given greater levels of responsibility—but he thinks it’s because the testosterone he took changed his behavior. He
Because the "biological grouping" isn't one. It's been a social grouping all along. You realise that groups have joined and left "white" at different times over the past few centuries, right? The historical definitions of races are amazing stuff. The Wikipedia article is a good start (and I link that in particular because you can be sure it's been closely inspected by all interested sides).
A century ago I would not have been 'white' - I'd be hopelessly ethnic.
Half-Italian-half-Polish with a dash of ashkenazi jewish five generations back? Waaaaay down in the caste system of even 1930. Nowadays? Just another white guy.
I think the Social Justice movement came out of postmodernism
The term approximately as we know it was used by Catholics in the 19th Century, coined in the 1840s by Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli. (How we got from there to Tumblr is an interesting journey but an approximately continuous one.)
c.f. the Cathedral, which is an attempt to frame the culture that the rest of us call "Western civilisation as it is now" as a conspiracy, or something enough like a conspiracy to speak of in the terms appropriate to one.
Compared to neoreaction, libertarianism and liberalism are virtually twins, as children of the Enlightenment.
Worried about "white extinction"? Stop worrying - more people are signing up to be white than ever before!
More specifically, I thought the main connection was (a) Moldbug frequenting OB (b) Mike Anissimov as the transhumanist neoreactionary. Was there more I've missed? (I know lots more of such showed up later.)
LessWrong primes you to suspect social consensus with people are crazy, the world is mad, teaches that you have to actually grapple with difficult stuff in detail instead of grabbing the closest cliche to end the discussion, and then introduces a Really Important Thing that relies on us being able to understand the mechanics of intelligence better than anyone has done before. It's not a long jump to go looking into human intelligence as the best existing model for intelligence we have, and then it turns out you don't need to dig very far into the research ...
I really don't think so. There's a pattern of this with creationists, c.f. Paul Broun condemning embryology as (literally) the work of Satan - which sounds truly weird unless you know how much e.g. Dawkins hammered on embryology as slam-dunk proof of evolution in The Greatest Show On Earth. This is another in a long series of bills attempting to get creationism a foothold in publicly-funded education, even if it has to be written entirely in dogwhistles. It may seem uncharitable in the evidence given (a single link), but not if you know the history of this sort of attempted legislative end-run.
The Fate of Galt's Gulch Chile, an experimental Objectivist community. Post is by a buyer.
When your delusion runs deep enough, the actual process of joined-up thinking itself is literally your enemy.
Remember to give Kaj an upvote for this post :-)
I note also KnaveOfAllTrades' recent post about the analogous concept of a "sports quotient".
The description: "Philosophy in Video Games [F]: A discussion of philosophical themes present in many different video games. Topics will include epistemology, utilitarianism, philosophy of science, ethics, logic, and metaphysics. All topics will be explained upon introduction and no prior knowledge is necessary to participate!"
Did they record all panels?
No, he didn't. He started with a description of something he might do individually. Literally the only things he says about anyone else editing Wikipedia are (1) to caution someone who stated an intention of doing so not to rush in, and (2) to speculate that if he does something like this it might be best for a group of people to cooperate on figuring out how to word it.