He did make some good points! A handful of original ones and a larger set repackaged into a format that was more readily accessible to a certain neurotype. He also used those good points to smuggle white supremacist talking points to an audience that likely wouldn't have otherwise sought them out.

Tbh my original feel on randomly bumbling onto slate star codex was ”there is a weird Smell to all of this but the guy makes some good points and Also he uses too many words so I feel embarrassed sharing it”

The two modal reactions are "everyone here is autistic (derogatory)" and "everyone here is autistic (laudatory), but oh no they're also all nazis".

now getting the idea that it was weaponized packaging, like some curious inverse of web scams tailored to only work on the most credulous people in existence

no you got it. the entire scott- and yud-o-verse both filter people, among other things, for tolerating their writing styles and their high-engagement people have a really particular psychological profile

i think rationalism having so many spinoff cults is multicausal

There are some leaked private emails where he's incredibly explicit about this, at least with regards to the crap Moldbug was writing at the time. That doesn't technically mean he was doing the same thing with race science but, c'mon, yes it does.

if it isn't these ones i'd enjoy seeing them, i have a collection in my brain of this stuff bsky.app/profile/segy...

Yeah, that's the one. Anecdotally the first time I ever heard of NRx was SSC's giant two parter telling me what in retrospect was a carefully chosen subset of the ways in which it was wrong, so it at least worked to disseminate the idea to one extra brain.

you gotta hand him some points for subtlety

in fact: he often specializes in arguing for the exact opposite of the thing he is trying to convince you of.

It's a really clever trick, credit where credit's due, because more often than not it's actually a quite good argument against the thing he's trying to convince you of. It works by legitimizing the question you wouldn't have asked, which is a really tough cognitive bias to catch in real time.

The most shocking thing, though, is probably that even in informal communications his writing is just Like That.

There are some interesting parallels here to our very own edgy-neurodiverse-bloglord-turned-politician Jussi Halla-Aho. Although his Scripta blog (famously quoted by Breivik) was explicitly open to racist stuff. Wikipedia entry has a whiff of Halla-aho apologism en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussi_H...

Relatedly: someone could have a day job in cleaning out the traces of ”race realist” guys writing in Finnish and Finnish-adjacent wikipedia

have heard similar things about norway and sweden

Yeah… similar scenes and smaller wikipedias are highly susceptible to the effect of some weird guy caring about a topic and of course the ”race realists” have their Special Interests, it could be edited out with some effort because they aren’t that dominant