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.

Super late response (sorry!), but yeah, history of science is great stuff. And your point about TESCREALS engaging with science fiction over science is entirely spot-on. (Which was me as a teenager. There but for the grace of god go I...)

Btw, if you want to read a FANTASTIC book dealing with people grappling with plate tectonics, John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Ancient World spans literal decades of interviews with geologists, and you get to start with geologists being deeply skeptical of this newfangled plate tectonics (not dismissive, but not convinced of the breadth of its explanatory power), and work to it being fully accepted science over the course of the book.

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?

Seldom have I seen anyone who has drunk their own kool-aid deeper than SBF.

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?

Thanks!