We didn’t intend to crosspost here. However I do expect LessWrong readers will link to material and arguments such as the recent criticial look at our terminology in “Is “tribalism” a useful concept?” and obviously we will be linking to a lot of rationality related content in our own writing there, both on this site and elsewhere, because we otherwise simply won’t be understood by many readers.
Edit: James has since decided to rather start his own blog and moved the article there, edited the link to reflect this. To give another example of a hopefully interesting post for even non-reactionary rationalists, I give Against Moral Progress.
FWIW, I agree that ‘factionalism’ is a far better term than tribalism. In fact, I am surprised that this has not been pointed out before—as it happens, I think I have actually been using ‘factionalism’ (and ‘faction’) consistently to mean what others on this site seem to call ‘tribalism’, although I am not going to take any credit for this. Factionalism is the accepted term in politics and political science, and the term ‘tribalism’ (also, ‘neotribalism’, or ‘new tribalism’) has other uses, for instance advocacy of small, self-contained communities (not exceeding Dunbar’s number of about 150 members) focused on a dense social network and relative egalitarianism.
It appears that the tribalism post has vanished—the link has gone dead, and it’s not on the main page anymore. What’s up with that? Will it be coming back later?
James has changed his mind about participating, he said he will take a break from this time consuming hobby and start a new blog of his own in a month or two. I enjoyed his previous two ones a lot and am looking forward to his next one. He also asked if it was ok to move his posts there and I said it was.
When he does I’ll edit the link and content of above post to reflect that. I hope he does post them since I still miss some of the writing he deleted when he abandoned Writings.
That post was at least 50% longer than necessary to make its point. There’s no way that I would even try to respond to such a wall of text—and I agree with the conclusion of that particular post (Anyone who thinks the debate word “tribalism” refers to the practice of ancient tribes instead of in-group / out-groupism is deeply confused about history).
But again, there’s no way I’m going to write an email to say essentially “I agree with the conclusion of the tribalism post, but do you really think anyone interesting to read is actually making that mistake?”
Unfortunately, I cannot look at the actual post and am merely trying to infer its contents based on posts on LessWrong. The only major argument I can make in favor of using the word “tribalism” is that the term has useful negative connotations:
“This is tribalist thinking.” == “This is silly, savage thinking which we are trying to overcome as rationalists.”
We didn’t intend to crosspost here. However I do expect LessWrong readers will link to material and arguments such as the recent criticial look at our terminology in “Is “tribalism” a useful concept?” and obviously we will be linking to a lot of rationality related content in our own writing there, both on this site and elsewhere, because we otherwise simply won’t be understood by many readers.
Edit: James has since decided to rather start his own blog and moved the article there, edited the link to reflect this. To give another example of a hopefully interesting post for even non-reactionary rationalists, I give Against Moral Progress.
FWIW, I agree that ‘factionalism’ is a far better term than tribalism. In fact, I am surprised that this has not been pointed out before—as it happens, I think I have actually been using ‘factionalism’ (and ‘faction’) consistently to mean what others on this site seem to call ‘tribalism’, although I am not going to take any credit for this. Factionalism is the accepted term in politics and political science, and the term ‘tribalism’ (also, ‘neotribalism’, or ‘new tribalism’) has other uses, for instance advocacy of small, self-contained communities (not exceeding Dunbar’s number of about 150 members) focused on a dense social network and relative egalitarianism.
I thought there was enough overlapping interest to be worth linking the launch. and I expect occasional posts may be interesting.
It appears that the tribalism post has vanished—the link has gone dead, and it’s not on the main page anymore. What’s up with that? Will it be coming back later?
James has changed his mind about participating, he said he will take a break from this time consuming hobby and start a new blog of his own in a month or two. I enjoyed his previous two ones a lot and am looking forward to his next one. He also asked if it was ok to move his posts there and I said it was.
When he does I’ll edit the link and content of above post to reflect that. I hope he does post them since I still miss some of the writing he deleted when he abandoned Writings.
That post was at least 50% longer than necessary to make its point. There’s no way that I would even try to respond to such a wall of text—and I agree with the conclusion of that particular post (Anyone who thinks the debate word “tribalism” refers to the practice of ancient tribes instead of in-group / out-groupism is deeply confused about history).
But again, there’s no way I’m going to write an email to say essentially “I agree with the conclusion of the tribalism post, but do you really think anyone interesting to read is actually making that mistake?”
Updating on that example.
Unfortunately, I cannot look at the actual post and am merely trying to infer its contents based on posts on LessWrong. The only major argument I can make in favor of using the word “tribalism” is that the term has useful negative connotations:
“This is tribalist thinking.” == “This is silly, savage thinking which we are trying to overcome as rationalists.”