John McPhee's so goddamn good, one of the best nonfiction writers out there. The absolute master of nonfiction narrative structure, imho.

And yeah, Deep Time is... a hell of a trip.

Oh geez, just saw this response, feel really bad I missed it- you put a ton of effort into it! (And I'm overwhelmed with work right now, so I can't reply in the depth it deserves, alas!)

In short, though: Your arguments largely make sense to me, and I'm reasonably persuaded by them! I too also think Kuhn has been treated worse than he deserves- yes, others have surpassed him since, but few of them are as approachable to laymen as he is, and that's worth something, imho. (I'm also kinder to Jared Diamond than many folks for similar reasons. Yeah, he fucked a lot of stuff up, but he got a lot of laymen- including me, before I started by studies in geology- interested in environmental history, so at the very least he deserves that nod.) And I'd agree that Feyerebend did better than Kuhn! (Maybe not on layman approachability, but he's not that much tougher than Kuhn- I certainly had no trouble, and I'm a dilettante in philosophy of science.)

Wish I had time for a longer (and very belated) reply, but thanks for the great response!

And is the "beam of pink energy from the future" a reference to Philip K Dick's Valis, by any chance?

As a non-tech person who has zero idea what Urbit is, this is still deeply funny to me.

I'm guessing there's probably a libertarian bent to this whole thing, somehow?

I'll check it out!

This is arcane, eldritch knowledge my mortal brain cannot comprehend.

My web guy can probably read it just fine, though, thanks for sharing!

Oh damn that's actually pretty good, I'm sad I didn't get the joke. (Lots of jokes sail over my head. I'm very literal much of the time, hah.)

I was in the States, so I was more at risk- but I'm a huge science nerd, enough that Yudkowsky's anti-science crap tossed up a BUNCH of red flags for me, and convinced me to start seriously researching the Rationalists and looking for critics.

Yeah it's interesting to see which of the regulars from Reddit transfer over or not. Took me months, and it was researching for this essay among old Sneerclub posts that inspired the switch.

Yeah being a full-on support group sounds EXHAUSTING. But we definitely already fulfilled that role to a small extent for a small number of people, especially back on Reddit where this space and rationalist spaces were more porous?

And I'm all for just cruelty to the eugenicists, neoreactionaries, and other nasties of the Rationalist movement. They have MORE than earned it. Something something Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance something something.

Thank you!

I actually have some thoughts about that topic as well- could be an interesting thread! (I personally think that we are, at least to a small extent, similar dynamic-wise to the cult survivor networks that help their friends and family escape the cult they themselves escaped- after all, a huge number of us are former Rationalists or, like myself, narrowly escaped their gravitational pull. Kinda puts a weird twist on our relationship to the Rationalists. Doesn't make us immune from transitioning from "unkind critics" to something worse, especially if we were to start brigading or something else awful, but I think has some valuable social lessons for the group?)

Hah I wish I could say I was still a teenager when I almost got sucked in, but...

And yeah, the internet was so much more fun back in the day.

I spent a lot of time on r/SneerClub back in the day, I know to keep things NSFW, hah! And I'll check out MoreWrite, that sounds fun!

And the archived copy is totally fine by me, who knows how long Reddit will survive?