Post #3977652
2026-07-21 05:05 UTC
I don’t think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
Replies (2)
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-07-21 21:23
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn’t even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he’s talking about. I’m not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It’s definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-07-22 08:09
Looking at the people who believe IQ is magic, billionaires are gods, and that you should freeze your head. These people are skeptics.