Post #3972881

2026-07-20 23:52 UTC

That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled “my falling out with the rationalist”, and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don’t actually discuss that much of the personal angle either…

Replies (3)

@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-07-21 06:17

I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of “leaving rationalism” is framed more him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone (James Damore the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don’t belong in tech). I don’t know the author so I don’t know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.

Open ##3978813
@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-07-21 09:42

yeah, subculturally they’re unrelated strains like, just factually in terms of history, they’re unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but they’re not the same as a group at all.

Open ##3982624
@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-21 14:50

The author tends to cull his own social media posts pretty aggressively if they get too much attention, or the wrong kind of attention, and it’s possible there’s more he wanted to say in the blog post but he chickened out at the last minute and self-censored it. But yeah, it felt like half a post.

Open ##3988388