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It's crimethink in the sense that people automatically downvote anything critical of the Enlightenment.
I took the survey.
1) Way too many to list here.
2) I still consider a near-future Singularity possible but not likely.
In reference to your first comment, basically yes.
1) The only reason I joined this thread in the first place is because someone attacked me, I don't particularly advocate neoreaction among LW groups, because I understand the community is hyper-liberalized to the point of absurdity.
2) Yes, my estimates of when the Singularity will occur moved from 2030-2040 to 2070-2080 over the last five years. This change is partially what has caused the neoreaction thing. I think there is a real risk that Western civilization will fall apart before we get there.
I personally think that many of them are confused. Given that it's a liberal society, I respect people's decisions to do what they want. Yes, strong families are beneficial. Various alternative lifestyles get in the way of that. Eventually societies need to choose between maximizing personal freedom and having strong families. This is a tradeoff that most liberals have yet to really consider seriously.
That depends. Was he once a spokesman for the Singularity Institute?
I was media director and also came up for the idea for Singularity Summit, yes.
It promotes gender dysphoria by introducing it where it didn't previously exist.
Citation on the testosterone business?
...
Read this.
You, and Moldbug, and advancedatheist, and every other neoreactionary are putting forward specific views of how society should be structured, specific views which is not merely "something other than the present arrangements". There may be a range of views in the nrsphere, but their doctrines are characterised by what they want, not by what they hate. They do a lot of the hating, to be sure, but they have a positive base of reasons for that.
Their doctrines are actually more characterized by what they dislike. As I said, NRx is a criticism first and foremost.
For example, monarchy and libertarian anarchy are incompatible with each other, and neither of them are Enlightenment structures (as "Enlightenment" is used by neoreactionaries). Are either or both of them compatible with or implied by neoreactionary principles? My reading of neoreactionaries suggests to me that monarchy is, and libertarian anarchy is not.
Some of the most prominent neoreactionaries are libertarian anarchists.
To clarify further, I'm not a universalist, so I don't think everyone "should" condemn or approve of any particular individual or group. I said that for groups that care about strong families, they will need to denormalize alternative lifestyles. If groups don't care about strong families, they can do whatever they like. The "strong families" bit is essential to the meaning of the paragraph.
It seems like the number of people doing it is strongly correlated to the increased popularity of Tumblr.
Islam is certainly not neoreactionary, because neoreactionary refers to the descendants of a certain circumscribed intellectual group that developed from Moldbug in the Bay Area.
Exactly.
No, I think that's a disingenuous usage. I also don't understand how pacifism is "objectively pro-fascist".
In the book, he uses Jihad as a stand-in for traditional values everywhere, not just Islamic Jihad.
No one said ethnostates were terminally valuable, necessarily, but yeah. I wonder what the Tumblr contingent's reaction to your last paragraph would be. You're basically saying ethnos is so important that multicultural states fall apart, and that ethnostates are the best pragmatic form of government.
No, but I find the juxtaposition of Marxist universalist ideas being fervently communicated by those who enjoy the economic and social benefits of an ethnostate to be amusing.
The mentality is, "wait, why aren't you openly admitting you're evil?"
Furthermore, it will likely lead to many outcomes that people today would complain about and disapprove of.
Isn't Israel an ethnonationalist state with a strong implicit hierarchy?
Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.
Monotonic as a percentage of GDP? Meaning the government will be 100% of GDP in finite time?
I'm guessing the mentality behind this comment is, "oh my god, this guy dares to question transsexualism? that's eviiiilll".
It is my quote. It is meaningfully distinct, in the sense that we can participate in a progressive society where it's normalized, but recognize how it emphatically does not fit into a conservative framework.
In general, this position is similar to that of many conservative Republicans. It may be shocking to many of the people on this site to be exposed to view held by a majority of Americans, but that's just too bad. In any progressive "struggle session", I will fail. This is because I reject the entire progressive worldview.
Yes, not appropriate for being a reactionary leader in a far right group. Neoreaction is a social conservative movement. This is similar to how you wouldn't put an NRA member in charge of the local Democratic Party headquarters.
Sort of. Traditionalism is great, though. You have the tone right.
When people see the headline "monarchy!" they're missing the 2-3 years of thinking and 2,000+ pages of reading that go between step 1 (let's reset social progress and then very carefully consider positive proposals) and step 2 (maybe, in some specific contexts, something like a certain class of monarchies would be useful for certain small-to-medium states).
Monarchy is just a tentative positive proposal (with limited potential application) I came to after several years of searching after the Cathedral mind virus had been dispelled. Moldbug seems to have come to something closer to anarchocapitalist seasteading-type city state proposals. Land leans even more anarchocapitalist than Moldbug. So, the positive recommendations vary widely. We are definitely not utopians, and admit our proposals are flawed just like any other.
First and foremost, neoreaction is about a critique. Positive proposals are less frequently discussed and there is great disagreement about them within neoreaction. So, many people involved in neoreaction are involved primarily for the negative critique, and make no commitment to any specific positive proposals.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There's no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. "Whatever gets things done effectively" is presently defined as "whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans".
As long as it's clear that the term isn't doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it's safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
You specifically said he was "hanging around neoreactionaries". It sounds like a quibble, but it's actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that's important.
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these.
Of course we have one, but it's secret.
Yes, because there are fundamentally high time preference incentives in democracy.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say "go back to", it's not that simple. Which is why "pre-Enlightenment" seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones "pre-Enlightenment" seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it's even considered.
In any case, "pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to "non-elephant" than "kangaroo".
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many "pre-Enlightenment" situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. "Pre-Enlightenment" does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says "wouldn't surprise me"?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
What should even draw "premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies" to anyone's attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
Why couldn't post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
Apology accepted. Your second-hand sources were wrong, tell them that. It's so difficult to have legitimate discussions about NRx when 90% of the opinion the Less Wrong community has about us is based on stuff that is completely made up.
This is one of the funnier things I've read this year.
Where did Yvain state this? I didn't think he had any neoreactionary friends.
Straightforwardly equating NRx with monarchy is a very surface-level (mis)understanding.
Where have I talked about the threat of gays and transsexuals? I merely asserted that one especially insane transsexual (Justine Tunney) not be associated with a reactionary movement. That makes sense, right?
Instapundit is highly ideological libertarian, so you should balance it out with a reactionary news source like Theden.tv or Steve Sailer.
Just because I'm setting boundary conditions does not mean I am generally discouraging people from involvement, that doesn't follow. However, it's true that there's an optimal recruitment rate which is substantially less than the maximum possible recruitment rate. Recruitment rates can be deliberately throttled back by introducing noise, posting more rarely, and through other methods.
NRx would be maximally strengthened if it could recruit as many people as possible while maintaining quality, but realistically we can only add a given number of people per week without compromising quality.
I'm fantastic at engaging others by design, I openly offer to publicly debate people, only Noah Smith has taken me up on it so far.
Re: ebola, I've never joked about using it as a biological weapon, I'm just responding to the funny meming that's going on on 4chan about ebola.
I propose the prediction be amended to, "The New York Times will never accept articles from Nicholas Wade again."
Apparently the Daily Caller article is mistaken, Wade took a retirement package two years ago and is now a science writer rather than science editor, according to Charles Murray here. So, the jury is still out on this one, we will wait and see if he is fired from being a science writer.
This has happened: 30-year New York Times Science Writer Out After Writing Book About Genetics, Race.
Good point. I find it pretty hard to believe that people would start using gold instead of silver for casual transactions, but I suppose it's possible.
An "apocalypse" like nuclear war is not particularly likely to kill off more than half the population, at most.
Everyone should have 100 lbs of red hard winter wheat at home, it's $100 and will feed you for 100 person-days.
No one is going to use gold because it's too valuable by weight and too difficult to measure tiny quantities. Instead, buy pre-1965 silver dimes. Silver is a much more reasonable price by weight.