You mean Part 7 (“The Dark Sides”), or the ways in which the book is bad?
I thought Part 7 was well-done, overall; he asks if we’re a cult (and decides “no” after talking about the question in a sensible way), has a chapter on “you can’t psychoanalyze your way to the truth”, and talks about feminism and neoreactionaries in a way that’s basically sensible.
Some community gossip shows up, but in a way that seems almost totally fair and respects the privacy of the people involved. My one complaint, as someone responsible for the LessWrong brand, is that he refers to one piece of community gossip as ‘the LessWrong baby’ and discusses a comment thread in which people are unkind to the mother*, while that comment thread happened on SlateStarCodex. But this is mostly the fault of the person he interviewed in that chapter, I think, who introduced that term, and is likely a sensible attempt to avoid naming the actual humans involved, which is what I’ve done whenever I want to refer to the gossip.
*I’m deliberately not naming the people involved, as they aren’t named in the book either, and suspect it should stay that way. If you already know the story you know the search terms, and if you don’t it’s not really relevant.
Not very much—the feminism chapter is 6 pages, and the neoreaction chapter is 5 pages. Both read like “look, you might have heard rumors that they’re bad because of X, but here’s the more nuanced version,” and basically give the sort of defense that Scott Alexander would give. About feminism, he mostly brings up Scott Aaronson’s Comment #171 and Scott Alexander’s response to the response, Scott Alexander’s explanation of why there are so few female computer programmers (because of the distribution of interests varying by sex), and the overreaction to James Damore. On neoreaction, he brings up Moldbug’s posts on Overcoming Bias, More Right, and Michael Anissimov, and says ‘comment sections are the worst’ and ‘if you’re all about taking ideas seriously and discussing them civilly, people who have no other discussion partners will seek you out.’
I’d like to know more about the dark sides part of the book
You mean Part 7 (“The Dark Sides”), or the ways in which the book is bad?
I thought Part 7 was well-done, overall; he asks if we’re a cult (and decides “no” after talking about the question in a sensible way), has a chapter on “you can’t psychoanalyze your way to the truth”, and talks about feminism and neoreactionaries in a way that’s basically sensible.
Some community gossip shows up, but in a way that seems almost totally fair and respects the privacy of the people involved. My one complaint, as someone responsible for the LessWrong brand, is that he refers to one piece of community gossip as ‘the LessWrong baby’ and discusses a comment thread in which people are unkind to the mother*, while that comment thread happened on SlateStarCodex. But this is mostly the fault of the person he interviewed in that chapter, I think, who introduced that term, and is likely a sensible attempt to avoid naming the actual humans involved, which is what I’ve done whenever I want to refer to the gossip.
*I’m deliberately not naming the people involved, as they aren’t named in the book either, and suspect it should stay that way. If you already know the story you know the search terms, and if you don’t it’s not really relevant.
Yeah, I meant part 7. What did he say about feminism and neoreaction?
Not very much—the feminism chapter is 6 pages, and the neoreaction chapter is 5 pages. Both read like “look, you might have heard rumors that they’re bad because of X, but here’s the more nuanced version,” and basically give the sort of defense that Scott Alexander would give. About feminism, he mostly brings up Scott Aaronson’s Comment #171 and Scott Alexander’s response to the response, Scott Alexander’s explanation of why there are so few female computer programmers (because of the distribution of interests varying by sex), and the overreaction to James Damore. On neoreaction, he brings up Moldbug’s posts on Overcoming Bias, More Right, and Michael Anissimov, and says ‘comment sections are the worst’ and ‘if you’re all about taking ideas seriously and discussing them civilly, people who have no other discussion partners will seek you out.’