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just reposting the 2014 leaked email about how Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) had specifically intended Slate Star Codex to promote neoreaction and race science
not a single person denied the email, they were just outraged at the leaker for breaking confidence
Yudkowsky even declared that they should be shunned, lol
this email is surprisingly little spoken of, I keep finding SSC/ACX readers who've never heard of it. for once the rationalists had the good sense not to fuss about it
i keep pointing centrists at this email and they can't reconcile the SSC article they liked with the writer of SSC explicitly saying he's trying to make them more racist
if you're wondering why techbros are all neoreactionaries these days, it's because they received scott's message fidelitously. SSC is a major vector of techfash radicalisation.
reasons to keep the fuckin receipts
text of scott email: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/gntraiv/
topher brennan tweets when posting the email: https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say
hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is
Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.
But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling.
Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn’t read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It’s just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren’t attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)
I looked into this one a while back—I’m pretty sure it’s the explanation Scott launders in “Whither Tartaria?”. Moldbug (2007):
Alexander (2021):
Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn’t read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It’s just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren’t attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)