To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)