“Rational Wiki presents an understanding of reality that I mostly agree with and is thus boring. I want some spicy takes so I’m going to go suck on the firehose of reactionary diarrhoea, but it’s ok because my throat game is too good to let any of it through” type shit

All time banger

@Architeuthis @dgerard "...impossible to ever take anything he writes in good faith."

See also this unguarded moment from Tumblr. All the alpha is in bad faith social engineering!
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9lj3g7

In his early blog posts, Scott Alexander talked about how he was not leaping through higher education in a single bound (he went overseas for medical school, and failed to get medical residency on his first try, ending up in a small Midwestern city). So I wonder why he is sure that in a world with fewer university degrees, he would have gotten as far as he did (medical schools in the USA used to limit admissions from people of his ethnicity).

Likewise with immigration restrictions: he knows that they often blocked Jews, many Europeans. and East Asians not just brown people right?

but look, i liked this article,

if one person came out and spilled the beans, it’d suggest that there might be more people who didn’t

I mean, after his full throated defense of Lynn's IQ map (featuring disgraced nazi college dropout Cremieux/TP0 as a subject matter expert) what other beans might be interesting enough to spill? Did he lie about becoming a kidney donor?

I think the emails are important because a) they make a case that for all his performative high-mindedness and deference to science and whinging about polygenic selection he came to his current views through the same white supremacist/great replacement milieu as every other pretentious gutter racist out there and b) he is so consistently disingenuous that the previous statement might not even matter much... he might honestly believe that priming impressionable well-off techies towards blood and soil fascism precursors was worth it if we end up allowing unchecked human genetic experimentation to come up with 260IQ babies that might have a fighting chance against shAItan.

I guess it could come out that despite his habit of including conflict of interest disclosures, his public views may be way more for sale than is generally perceived.

[omitted a paragraph psychoanalyzing Scott]

I don't think that he was trying to make a threat. I think that he was trying to explain the difficulties of being a cryptofascist! Scott's entire grey-tribe persona collapses if he ever draws a solid conclusion; he would lose his audience if he shifted from cryptofascism to outright ethnonationalism because there are about twice as many moderates as fascists. Scott's grift only continues if he is skeptical and nuanced about HBD; being an open believer would turn off folks who are willing to read words but not to be hateful. His "appreciat[ion]" is wholly for his brand and revenue streams.

This also contextualizes the "revenge". If another content creator publishes these emails as part of their content then Scott has to decide how to fight the allegations. If the content is well-sourced mass-media journalism then Scott "leave[s] the Internet" by deleting and renaming his blog. If the content is another alt-right crab in the bucket then Scott "seek[s] some sort of horrible revenge" by attacking the rest of the alt-right as illiterate, lacking nuance, and unable to cite studies. No wonder he doesn't talk about us or to us; we're not part of his media strategy, so he doesn't know what to do about us.

In this sense, we're moderates too; none of us are hunting down Scott IRL. But that moderation is necessary in order to have the discussion in the first place.

I'm reasonably certain worse emails exist but they're with sympathetic individuals.

if one person came out and spilled the beans, it’d suggest that there might be more people who didn’t

keep in mind these mails are years-disclosed by now - at least a few of them will have learned a lesson and gotten more careful

(I'm constantly glad that as many of them do not)

I think Hallquist had a short-lived blog with criticisms of LessWrong and EA between his time on FreethoughtBlogs/Pantheos and his run for office and Medium blog. Possibly https://topherhallquist.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/reply-to-scott-alexander/ In the original Twitter post, Hallquist described Alexander as "a vague internet acquaintance at the time (when he sent the emails)" and it sounds like after 2014 Hallquist explored LW and EA and decided they were messed up. (Hallquist's post also suggests that if you want to sound like a bold contrarian, see what a median expert at a university think about a topic rather than reading blogs).

I like to remind myself that I see what happens online, but the offers of money and the sexual propositions probably mostly happen in person or between people who have met in person. So I don't know as much about the LessWrong or EA communities as I think.