This was an excellent read if you’re aware of the emails but never bothered to read his citations or to dig into what the blather about object-level and meta-level problems was specifically about, which is presumably most people.
So, a deeper examination of the email paints 2014 Siskind as a pretty run of the mill race realist who’s really into black genes are dumber, you guys studies and who thinks that higher education institutions not taking them seriously means they are deeply broken and untrustworthy, especially with anything to do with pushing back against racism and sexism. Oh, and he is also very worried that immigration may destroy the West, or at least he gently urges you to get up to speed with articles coincidentally pushing that angle, and draw your own conclusions based on pure reason.
Also it seems that in private he takes seriously stuff he has already debunked in public, which makes it basically impossible to ever take anything he writes in good faith.
In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).
Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?
In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound
He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.
Other than that, I think it’s ok in principle to be ideologically opposed to something even if you and yours happened to benefit from it. Of course, it immediately becomes iffy if it’s a mechanism for social mobility that you don’t plan on replacing, since in that case you are basically advocating for pulling up the ladder behind you.
He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.
wait, this man is a psychiatrist? or is that another scott
Yes, Scott Alexander is an unusual rationalist blogger who had a credentialed professional career as a psychiatrist. After Substack became his patron, he opened his own medical practice, but the website has said “not accepting new patients at this time” since 2022. So he seems to live off gifts from fellow travelers with a side hustle in psychiatry.
i’ll risk a guess that running ritalin-dispenser-as-a-service type business catering to overly confident rationalists might get him a pretty penny
That is very possible although I would guess that was earlier in his career given that he does not advertise as treating ADHD or similar. He has two small children, a writing job, and side projects like writing end-of-the-world stories for AI 2027. His practice has a name drawn from Lord of the Rings like other things in the Thielsphere.
he had a blogpost about how amphetamines risks are overstated and it’s fine actually for more people than usually prescribed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
I’m midway through this and this part stood out to me, this is part of the email that was written by S.Al, edited for length:
Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. […] Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work […] they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new
The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them. Despite considering myself pretty smart and clueful, I constantly learn new and important things […] from the Reactionaries. Anything that gives you a constant stream of very important new insights is something you grab as tight as you can and never let go of.
The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
“Rational Wiki presents an understanding of reality that I mostly agree with and is thus boring. I want some spicy takes so I’m going to go suck on the firehose of reactionary diarrhoea, but it’s ok because my throat game is too good to let any of it through” type shit
The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
I’m pretty sure I’ve dunked on this quote before, but I can’t even imagine the hubris on display here. Obviously if you read a bunch of convincing lies you’re going to end up believing some of them! He knows he’s reading propaganda (I’ve fucking read articles written by him talking about how Moldbug deliberately tries to trick the reader into believing bullshit by appealing to innate biases), but he’s 100% sure he can divine the “hidden truths” just by thinking about it with his big Rationalist brain!
It’s like seeing someone using heroin because they’ve convinced themselves they’re too smart to get addicted, except dumber because at least that guy didn’t write a fucking anti-heroin FAQ!
image description
A picture of the cartoon cat Garfield, with the caption “You are not immune to propaganda”
(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by “appreciate”, I mean that if you ever do, I’ll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)
Taken literally, this seems like kind of a fucked up thing to say to a friend. Or a stranger. Anyone really. Why would you say this? Why would you write this in an email and then send it, on purpose, under any circumstance?
scott clearly thought that it was important to get that message out. idk what precisely happened there, but i’ll risk a guess that perhaps scott thought that he found a partner in crime, so to speak, and secrecy would help them both. adversary would just use info as is. maybe the biggest thing scott could get in terms of blackmail was flimsy “okay, but you are into this thing too” which won’t be effective in all cases, or maybe he didn’t even had that
if one person came out and spilled the beans, it’d suggest that there might be more people who didn’t
I think Hallquist had a short-lived blog with criticisms of LessWrong and EA between his time on FreethoughtBlogs/Pantheos and his run for office and Medium blog. Possibly https://topherhallquist.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/reply-to-scott-alexander/ In the original Twitter post, Hallquist described Alexander as “a vague internet acquaintance at the time (when he sent the emails)” and it sounds like after 2014 Hallquist explored LW and EA and decided they were messed up. (Hallquist’s post also suggests that if you want to sound like a bold contrarian, see what a median expert at a university think about a topic rather than reading blogs).
I like to remind myself that I see what happens online, but the offers of money and the sexual propositions probably mostly happen in person or between people who have met in person. So I don’t know as much about the LessWrong or EA communities as I think.
