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
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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
aug 25, 2025, 7:18 pm • 9 0 • view
i think rationalism having so many spinoff cults is multicausal
aug 25, 2025, 7:18 pm • 7 0 • view
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.
aug 25, 2025, 7:23 pm • 4 0 • view
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...
aug 25, 2025, 7:24 pm • 2 0 • view
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.
aug 25, 2025, 7:37 pm • 4 0 • view
you gotta hand him some points for subtlety
aug 25, 2025, 7:38 pm • 2 0 • view
in fact: he often specializes in arguing for the exact opposite of the thing he is trying to convince you of.
aug 25, 2025, 7:43 pm • 2 0 • view
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.
aug 25, 2025, 7:50 pm • 2 0 • view
surely not, the fact that he is very persuasive and he just perpetually seems to convince people of the opposite of the thing he professes to believe must be a coincidence. it is unfortunate that such a thing keeps happening to him
aug 25, 2025, 7:53 pm • 3 0 • view
It is surely just an unfortunate accident that the moderation rules he champions specifically preclude exploring questions of salience.
aug 25, 2025, 8:00 pm • 4 0 • view
The most shocking thing, though, is probably that even in informal communications his writing is just Like That.
aug 25, 2025, 7:39 pm • 4 0 • view
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...
aug 26, 2025, 4:06 am • 1 0 • view
Relatedly: someone could have a day job in cleaning out the traces of ”race realist” guys writing in Finnish and Finnish-adjacent wikipedia
aug 26, 2025, 4:21 am • 2 0 • view
have heard similar things about norway and sweden
aug 26, 2025, 4:22 am • 1 0 • view
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
aug 26, 2025, 4:29 am • 2 0 • view