So yeah. What I want is for Scott Siskind to stop hurting people while the number of people whose deaths his actions have directly and materially contributed to is still in the single digits. What I want is for people to stop listening to his poorly written and poorly argued bullshit. What I want, in fact, is for people to stop listening to all of it: Siskind, Yudkowsky, Moldbug, Thiel, Trump, Bannon, and all of the other fucking idiots helping work towards human extinction. I want them to shut up and go away and stop making the world an actively worse place to live in.

I don’t expect this essay will accomplish that though. So my second choice is that one of the well-meaning people to be suckered in by Siskind’s con will read this and go “oh, shit” because they finally see what’s been done to them and what purposes it served. And they’ll go and be better people afterwards who don’t read eugenicists and sexists and maybe when they hear someone talk about being sexually assaulted they’ll actually listen and work to make a world where that happens less. So by all means, if you find yourself arguing with some Slate Star Codex fan online, link this article. If I can manage this happening once, frankly, all 12,500 words of this and the genuine unhappiness they provoked will be worthwhile.

I admire the sentiment, I admire the work, I admire the sheer labor behind it. Lord knows Hubski has its SSC problems. I think this thread is my most beastly; the closest I've ever gotten to agreeing with Scott Siskind - in my recollection - is "eh, he kinda has a point about that, I can see why he attracts the audience he does."

I think the core flaw with his style of argumentation is summed up in this comment in response to "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup":

I suppose he was just trying to flip the semantics around, in the same way some racist talking-head in the media might bleat about "problems of 'black culture,'" he can do a similar song and dance for "white culture." Ultimately, it didn't really feel like he was railing against himself, or providing some sort of insightful self-critique, he was using it as a code word or dog whistle for the Red Tribe.

blackbootz, among others, would send me SSC screeds on a monthly basis for a while. I have been encouraged to read Scott Siskind for twelve, fifteen years now. My takeaway was "what a bunch of fuzzy-headed thinking" which is different than Ms. Sandifer's assessment of malfeasance. I don't think it really clicked until Emil Torres and others started to dismantle the whole "TESCREAL" constellation, and bless Michael Lewis' black heart, it didn't gel until that fucking Sam Bankman Fried book. Here's SBF arguing against Shakespeare:

Sam was asked, in high school, to write an essay on Shakespeare because he was one of the greatest authors in the English language. Sam sucks at literature (shocker!) and is utterly disinterested in the human experience (I know, right?) so his argument was not against the greatness of Shakespeare's writing, his argument was that studying ancient literature at all was a waste of time because statistically speaking, there are more humans now than there were in the 1600s therefore it is improbable that any author from the 1600s is better than an author from the 2020s from a pure numbers standpoint.

Here's the first move out of the playbook, illustrated at a literally sophomore level: reject conventional standards of evaluation out of hand and substitute your own. Note that Lewis doesn't describe Sam as offering any examples to back up his argument. Note also that Sam Bankman Fried has publicly hated on "books" - "I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post." Which goes to the second move: it's the vibe, not the facts.

The sleight-of-hand at the heart of all this rationalist-effective-altruist-accelerationist-libertarian bullshit is a loose and conditional set of BELIEFS, not rational conclusions, and everything that comes out of it is an exercise in framing to reinforce the convictions of the converted. This, more than anything, is why it drives the rest of us bugshit, I think - you've got a group of people pretending that their every thought has been arrived at through painstaking study and when questioned about it, the opponent is subjected to a bullshit whirlwind of whataboutism, conditionality and cherry-picking that allow other BELIEVERS to chin-stroke and nod thoughtfully about how yes, actually, Hugo Drax should exterminate the world with orchid poison from orbit for the betterment of all mankind.

The core, unassailable belief at the heart of Untitled is "white nerds are worth more than anyone else" and everything around it is prevarication. It's wooly to the world and galvanizing to the believers because the world doesn't view the superiority of the white nerd as axiomatic while the TESCREAL crowd - a famously empathy-bereft group - cannot imagine things any other way. This more than anything is the driving force behind their love of eugenics - they cannot imagine (or tolerate) any use of eugenics that will not benefit them, because who on earth would go after white nerds? The fact that one of their saints, Ayn Rand, was driven from her home and her family's business burned by an anti-intellectual mob with a 200-year policy of racial purity never enters into it because it isn't about the thought. It isn't about the argument. It isn't about the facts. It's about the vibe, and the vibe is "I should be getting more girls than those annoying Hispanics on the swim team because I am a superior being."

The most success I have had in getting people to question these ideas comes from assailing the arguments as stupid, not malevolent. You can't meet them at their level because they're just floating around saying whatever feels good in the moment. If you engage with them as if they were genuine, you make them genuine which is exactly what they're after. I think Ms. Sandifer errs when she argues that Scott Siskind comes from a place of disingenuousness. He clearly believes everything he says, and he clearly believes it quite earnestly. The fact of the matter is, however, that all these people have convinced themselves they've arrived at the only logical conclusion when in fact they've spent 9000 words creating a conditional house-of-cards to say "if you tilt your head and squint, you'll see it my way." And, of course, anyone who refuses to tilt their head and squint is disingenuous. Thus the whole "if you're going to argue with me you have to address these nine bullet points" bit.

Where I seriously disagree with Ms. Sandifer is where she describes it as "beige."

Steve Bannon described this as "flooding the zone with bullshit" while RAND calls it the "firehose of falsehood" propaganda model. Thomas Rid traces it back to the Okhrana of the 19th Century - talkin' Czarist disinformation and propaganda in the Hapsburg era. And it has always been deployed against freer societies.

Sarah Chayes wrote a whole book about how, going back to Thucydides, the hallmark of a failing state is corruption. We hold up the Code of Hammurabi and the Magna Carta for a reason - they establish fairness. They codify rules that say "if this, then that". Society has always advanced on fairness and declined on corruption, a point even Graeber backed up. But in wavering liberal societies based on rules, illiberal societies based on personality can make hay by "flooding the zone with bullshit."

And the thing is? If it's your flavor of bullshit, you just swim in it. You know each particular turd is all just a part of the vibe, none of it really matters, because things are going your way. And you also know that the rules-based world you're railing against is going to have to counter every single fleck of poop because whatabout this whatabout that whatabout the other and fundamentally, conservatives and reactionaries are much more about vibes than debates. And it works for a while, if it's going your way, and you're on the right side of the dividing line. But it never ends well.

The problem with vibe-based political systems is the vibe can shift. There's a reason that the world's most liberal democracies have the most rules. Anyone who has ever operated under Robert's Rules of Order rolls their eyes on the reg over all the procedural nonsense... until someone loses their shit, nobody is friends anymore and holy shit that framework you were just dogging saved your fucking bacon. People always point to Hitler whenever they want to discuss demagoguery but the Weimar Republic was a shitshow of reprisal and recrimination and someone like Hitler was going to come around. This "flood the zone" method? It's how Italy went fascist. It's how The Philippines went fascist. It's how Israel went fascist. And it sure as shit is how Team Trump tried to take America fascist.

Ms. Sandifer mentions Gamergate in passing. She does it a disservice. Dale Beran draws a bright white line between GamerGate and Trump. It's not a dot plot, it's not a trail of breadcrumbs, it's a straight vector from A to B. And it fundamentally comes down to a bunch of underemployed men with no social skills who have nothing better to do than tear shit down.

So does ISIS, btw.

Robert Putnam wrote a book about 25 years ago about how we were all fundamentally fucked because we didn't know our neighbors anymore, we didn't have any civic engagement, we didn't have any friends and how that was fundamentally bad for democracy.

We've [Americans] been able to run a different kind of society. A less statist society, a more free-market society, because we had real strength in the area of social capital and we had relatively high levels of social trust. We sort of did trust one another, not perfectly, of course, but we did. Not compared to other countries. And all that is declining, and I began to worry, "Well, gee, isn't that going to be a problem, if our system is built for one kind of people and one kind of community, and now we've got a different one. Maybe it's not going to work so well."

Putnam matters because he decided society was made up of two kinds of capital - bonding capital (what makes similar people stick together) and bridging capital (what makes dissimilar people stick together). He doesn't matter because he's pretty much entirely known for coming up with a theory of Life Before Facebook. I guess the real question is whether our society has fundamentally changed since 2000? Or whether it's simply oscillating around the same trend line.

Thomas Rid did a pretty good job of making me see Putin behind everything that goes wrong in the free world. Thing about stochastic shit like this is if it costs little and pays back a lot, flood the zone early and often. But the more I look around, the more I see it all winding down the way it historically does. If it doesn't push the wall over, it crashes back to nothing. If there's any good news around all this it's that the harsh sunlight of scrutiny is drying up the money, everyone is sick of the bullshit, and intellectual movements end up looking like lame versions of the Panther Moderns.

The Trump Administration was a vibe-based presidency. You were in good until you were fired on Twitter. You were the best buddy until you were the back-stabber. You were in until you were out. This is also how the Soviet Union ran, and how Russia runs. It's how populism works. The secret to success of representative democracy is the safety to be unpopular. You get to keep playing the game even if you insist on doing that thing that the rest of the polity thinks is no fun. Often, you get to be the one right person five, ten years later when everyone else is proven to be wrong. It moderates everybody else and gives them the courage to be wrong. It allows you to vote your convictions and it allows you to change them when they're wrong.

I can't think of a single success - monetary, social, legislative, spiritual - that the vibes-based process has enjoyed in this latest wave. I think Father Time is coming for Slate Star Codex and its ilk. Effective Altruism, Effective Accelerationism, eugenics of any sort - none of it withstands the harsh scrutiny of the light and the past ten years of financial innovation sure look like rich white sociopaths enabled by rich white sociopaths. You do enough enabling of the wrong thing, you lose the ability. OpenAI just lost its chance to be a money inferno, much the same way WeWork did.

Take away these assholes' money, you take away their power. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for Robert Mercer, and he mostly just wanted to cheat the IRS; all the political bullshit in between is between his daughter and Steve Bannon.

I think nature is healing.

I hope nature is healing.

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The image up top, BTW, is William Blake's "Ancient of Days" Copy K, which is probably either an in-joke between the author and herself or some serious in-group signaling, as this whole posse has put a whole lot of symbolism behind one little drawing.