ahopefullycuterrobot

Yes! I have my issues with Jojo Rabbit, but it does a good job of portraying Nazism as a laughable ideology. It's good praxis, because Nazis like to portray themselves as being cool (fast cars, uniforms, the brotherhood of the trenches), but in reality, it was a mix of cringe, parvenu social climbing, and disgusting.

Haven't watched Z's video, but I'd also note I'm deeply sceptical that the nerd/jock distinction was ever real past maybe the 90s.

In my own school (and those of all the people I've discussed it with), if you were in advanced classes, you almost always played a sport. Even geeky interests - like video games, some anime (Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon), and to a lesser extent comics - were incredibly popular. There were cliques, but those cliques were normally personality and friend based rather than academic vs. sport. If there were a divide, it was between those who were socially skilled and those who were not, but that didn't neatly map onto whether you were smart or not.

Even as a kid, I mostly thought of the nerd/jock stuff as being a marketing ploy, rather than reflecting my own experiences. Which isn't to say you wouldn't get people identifying as nerds or geeks, but to say that the actual social reality didn't seem to match.

Fascists were always cringe. Himmler was a weird occultist. Goering was a drug addict still high on his glorious from World War I. Hitler was a profoundly lazy man with terrible taste in art. There were normal fascists (there had to be), but the leadership was always cringe. Unfortunately, being cringe doesn't stop a movement from killing vast numbers of people.

Is this what Brits felt like with Dominic Cummings?

The arguments in favour of Walz increase without bound.

The rationalists - sometimes making me question my commitment to prison abolition. Actually, not frequently enough, considering how few are arrested.

Will Ellison include her love for hierarchical, power-struggle Chinese harem dynamics in this novella or is she saving it for the sequel?

The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marks' book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if there's a detailed timeline.

After my own heart right here. I followed some version of Luca Hammer's guide to categorise everyone I followed on Twitter into communities, then created rss feeds of them using nitter. It was fascinating seeing how they clustered together. I think I still have an old gephi file with that output. I did this before Musk bought Twitter, since I knew he was going to wreck it.

Basically, I would have killed for this tool.

(I'm now wondering if anyone's published a guide on this for bluesky.)

I'm mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.

Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He's been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he's even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I'm curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.

Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I've never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.

Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I'm pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven't seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald's another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan's account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn't emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.

Longer than I'd intend, but the way I describe it is probably as

1. A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.

2. Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.

3. Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.

4. As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.

5. In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.

(1-3) are what I'd consider core. (4-5) are what I'd add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I'd also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko's Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).

Nick Land claimed that trans women were the Jews of gender in response to some technofascist commenting about average trans femme IQ. I wonder if this idea is just in the air amongst LessWrongites and so you have many instances of parallel evolution or whether there was some actual direct adoption. I also half remember an AI-booster claiming that estradiol might be a life extension drug.

Someone really should do a dissertation about gender and race in the TESCREAL subculture. The results would be fascinating.