Probably. LW wasn’t where I met my first neoreactionary, but it was where I met my second through my fifth.
It also draws on a similar demographic: disaffected mostly-young mostly-nerds with a distrust of conventional academia and a willingness to try unusual things to solve problems.
In defense of distrusting conventional academia, I currently work in conventional academia, and it has plenty of genuine problems above and beyond the mere fact that someone on the internet might have some hurt feelings about not fitting in at graduate school (or some secret long-held resentment about taking a lucrative industry job instead of martyring themselves to the idol of Intellect by… going to grad-school).
I still trust a replicated scientific study more than most other things, but I don’t necessarily trust academia anymore to have done the right studies in the first place, and I have to remind myself that studies can only allocate belief-mass between currently salient hypotheses.
Probably. LW wasn’t where I met my first neoreactionary, but it was where I met my second through my fifth.
It also draws on a similar demographic: disaffected mostly-young mostly-nerds with a distrust of conventional academia and a willingness to try unusual things to solve problems.
In defense of distrusting conventional academia, I currently work in conventional academia, and it has plenty of genuine problems above and beyond the mere fact that someone on the internet might have some hurt feelings about not fitting in at graduate school (or some secret long-held resentment about taking a lucrative industry job instead of martyring themselves to the idol of Intellect by… going to grad-school).
I still trust a replicated scientific study more than most other things, but I don’t necessarily trust academia anymore to have done the right studies in the first place, and I have to remind myself that studies can only allocate belief-mass between currently salient hypotheses.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I am after all such a mostly-young mostly-nerd.
You seemed be saying that conventional academia doesn’t do well by absolute standards, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is doing better relatively.
Well yes, and that makes sense: conventional academia is one of the only organized efforts to do well at all.