More specifically, I thought the main connection was (a) Moldbug frequenting OB (b) Mike Anissimov as the transhumanist neoreactionary. Was there more I’ve missed? (I know lots more of such showed up later.)
LessWrong primes you to suspect social consensus with people are crazy, the world is mad, teaches that you have to actually grapple with difficult stuff in detail instead of grabbing the closest cliche to end the discussion, and then introduces a Really Important Thing that relies on us being able to understand the mechanics of intelligence better than anyone has done before. It’s not a long jump to go looking into human intelligence as the best existing model for intelligence we have, and then it turns out you don’t need to dig very far into the research on human intelligence to hit stuff only the Dark Enlightenment folk seem to be openly talking about, while the rest of the world seems to be happy with S. J. Gould’sfinal word.
I didn’t know or had forgotten about) the OB connection.
In any case, when I was talking about a connection, I meant to explain why there would be a enough similarity of ideas and temperament that NRx would be active members of LW rather than exploring the historical connection.
It’s certainly possible to come up with explanations—Moldbug commented on OB; the DE seems fringe due to memetic immune disorders to statements generally accepted as true around LW; LW primes you to suspect social consensus; etc. -- but are explanations necessary?
Not many LWers identified as NRx on the survey, and not many NRx writers post on LW. I would not be surprised if the overlap between LW and, say, conlangers turned out to be about as large as the overlap between LW and NRx.
There is also a non-negligible overlap between NRx and conlangers, which is why I used that example, and also why I don’t think there’s anything more going on here than “there are only so many Americans who will join groups of people who do complicated things involving words on the internet”.
The history of LW and NR is older than Scott’s posts on the subject.
The plausible connection between LW and NR is that both have an underlying premise that life can be improved by taking a fairly abstract approach.
There were several active NR posters. They decided LW wasn’t where they wanted to hang out, and some of them can be found at More Right..
More specifically, I thought the main connection was (a) Moldbug frequenting OB (b) Mike Anissimov as the transhumanist neoreactionary. Was there more I’ve missed? (I know lots more of such showed up later.)
LessWrong primes you to suspect social consensus with people are crazy, the world is mad, teaches that you have to actually grapple with difficult stuff in detail instead of grabbing the closest cliche to end the discussion, and then introduces a Really Important Thing that relies on us being able to understand the mechanics of intelligence better than anyone has done before. It’s not a long jump to go looking into human intelligence as the best existing model for intelligence we have, and then it turns out you don’t need to dig very far into the research on human intelligence to hit stuff only the Dark Enlightenment folk seem to be openly talking about, while the rest of the world seems to be happy with S. J. Gould’s final word.
I didn’t know or had forgotten about) the OB connection.
In any case, when I was talking about a connection, I meant to explain why there would be a enough similarity of ideas and temperament that NRx would be active members of LW rather than exploring the historical connection.
It’s certainly possible to come up with explanations—Moldbug commented on OB; the DE seems fringe due to memetic immune disorders to statements generally accepted as true around LW; LW primes you to suspect social consensus; etc. -- but are explanations necessary?
Not many LWers identified as NRx on the survey, and not many NRx writers post on LW. I would not be surprised if the overlap between LW and, say, conlangers turned out to be about as large as the overlap between LW and NRx.
There is also a non-negligible overlap between NRx and conlangers, which is why I used that example, and also why I don’t think there’s anything more going on here than “there are only so many Americans who will join groups of people who do complicated things involving words on the internet”.