By all means try to use this blog post to hold onto whatever community you happen to find yourself in. It is a toolkit for strangling a scene to death and feeling good about it. The gamergate handbook for smearing people (not Shermer, just women) you happen to want out of your company.

Just restating what Chapman says is not a correction? Perhaps I wouldn’t come out swinging like this so hard except that perhaps nothing makes me more angry than being told I just don’t understand something blindingly straightforward, and perhaps if I did I would agree with you. Do you think other people just aren’t as smart as you are? Do you talk like that to people in daily life? Who the hell do you think you are?

Chapman’s fanatics are (eg.) the people who organize the independent film fest and talk endlessly about independent films but don’t direct or act in their own films, or the people who reply to posts but don’t initiate their own threads.

Yes, I am not confused, and this is precisely what makes his terminology useless. The people who reply to posts and talk endlessly about stuff are frequently deadbeats, but this is not captured by his pseudo-technical terminology. Chapman has defined “fanatics” self-servingly as the people who do the productive work and defined them against “mops” as people who are less interested and do not do productive work: it is a false and a very stupid distinction for the reasons I have outlined

Personally I don’t think I have met anyone fitting this description: “They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space.”

Yes, this is another problem with the essay. Since it only serves to flatter the prejudices of a sympathetic reader, the dynamics it claims to point out will only be recognisable to somebody willing to indulge those prejudices, whereas to the unsympathetic reader it just doesn’t have anything to say at all.*

*slight correction: it doesn’t have anything interesting to say at all. It does perform adequate speech-acts viz. draws the boundaries of what Chapman considers acceptable participation in a scene according to his “judgement” about who is and isn’t a fruitful and productive member of his little society. But that makes it an effective piece of political propaganda, a worthy role but not the one he would like to intend for it.

Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book

I don’t even know who Harriet Hall is, but this undersells it. Just in the wikipedia link that we can all see, she says that the (fake) issues raised by Abigail Shriner in Irreversible Damage, “urgently need to be looked into”. That book, far from a mere “dodgy-sounding book”, was an enormously influential, best-selling, and intensely transphobic avalanche of lies and self-serving distortions.

Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is about how groups of artists establish symbols

That work is not primarily about symbols or groups of artists at all, and insofar as it is about symbols and groups of artists it is about how mechanical reproduction diminishes the ability of artists to control the symbolic structure of their artworks. With that established, that work is primarily about art in a technological society, and about how technics shape (a) art, (b) politics, (c) the mediating interface between the two (which is itself technology in “the age of mechanical reproduction)

Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is about how consumerist states cultivate mass consciousness through mass media

For Debord, the state is merely part of the Spectacle. The book is about how capitalism itself mediates culture through mass media. The idea of “mass consciousness” is too vague to get much of a look-in here, although the book could be plausibly explained as developing the vague idea of “mass consciousness” into something more concrete.

I have been sufficiently tempted to point out one of the ways in which this is horribly stupid viz. it is written from the perspective of somebody who is a liability to whatever scene he claims to have been a part of

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Everybody with half a brain knows that actually fanatics are frequently fucking deadbeats, who are therefore incapable of materially contributing beyond their physical presence. That’s fine, but it doesn’t lend itself to the financial stability of the collective enterprise, especially if they expect to get free stuff out of the bargain, which they frequently do. Of course, this isn’t the case for everybody, but that just proves the point that this is unbelievably fucking stupid

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

“Fanatics” like this treat whatever community has sprung up around its artists as a vending machine for personal connection and social clout. They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space. This isn’t a “fanatic” actually, because again, it’s just a(n extreme and highly idealised) type of guy, but again that is proving the point of the stupidity of this enterprise.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

cf. Bob Dylan, “Judas”

Even reading just a paragraph of the article you get the sense that Chapman is an insufferable dork who feels somehow burned about something in his past

The strangest thing about it is that the complaints are played so much to such an intense stereotype it’s as if Chapman is the only person in his model who actually embodies what would otherwise be a ludicrously idealised and caricatured type, and it turns out to be the horrible deadbeat superfan who ruins everything trying to make it his personal possession

Chapman is a fucking moron, and not rationalist curious but deeply embedded in rationalism. “Post-rationalism”, when it was new, was nothing more than a way of being into (at the shallow end) Deeprak Chopra type shit for personal growth on “rational” grounds (“if it works it isn’t stupid” or whatever) without getting kicked out of the clubhouse. It’s harder to see those outlines now because mainline rationalists have effectively adopted that plus far more extreme attitudes in their day to day over the last 5+ years, so post-rationalism looks harder to understand and more interesting than it really is or was.

Chapman himself was trying to do rationalist existentialism (hence his title, “Meaningness”, the quality of being meaningful, with particular respect to “having meaning in one’s life”).

Of course he was naive, but he’s also just writing yet another completely oblivious ass-pulled blog pretending to do meaningful sociology with just whatever shit came off the top of his dome. It’s identical to everything else written in this regard within 15 miles of LessWrong and should therefore be ignored except insofar as its laughed out of the room.

By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.

Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams

TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.

It’s a combination of those things.

Because rationalism the coherent phenomenon was founded with the more or less explicit intention of building a cult, Yudkowsky’s original rule-set incorporated all of the basic cult rules, which every cult leader tends to be able to work out mostly for themselves by looking at what they outwardly want to build (a movement) and what they inwardly want to do with it (retain personal power over that movement)

So, for example, the particular way that Yudkowsky frames “objectivity” coalesces later on around the “object level” vs “meta level” dichotomy, “low” vs “high” “decoupling”, the “grey tribe”, but it’s there from the beginning in his insistence on the highly specific and idiosyncratic framework proposed in The Sequences, his constant explicit insistence on the rarity of his chosen elect, and also just in (a) his consistent lambasting of people who work outside that framework in the text of The Sequences themselves, and (b) his sometimes hilarious neg/love-bombing of the reader

Of (b), my favourite example is that passage where he bizarrely takes an unnecessary moment to call you an idiot if you think that there’s a universal clock measuring time throughout the universe, in the full knowledge that his nerdy readers are aware of relativity

So the whole system, beginning with LessWrong’s very founding, is geared to control the framing in ways like not naming names. Naming names is a failure of objectivity, because it brings in the sorts of particulars that might exercise your ordinary human judgement - ordinary human judgement is bad, we know this from Daniel Kahneman, and that’s another rule of objectivity. So, moreover, the whole system is geared so as to keep “objective” framings which favour HBD “in-group”, and to displace good human judgements (‘Richard Hanania is a ridiculous mendacious racist’) into the “out-group”).

HBD hegemony within the movement (in influence if not in numbers), moreover, could not but have been the eventual outcome of the same rule-set. In spite of his own protestations, Yudkowsky’s pugilistic naturalism was sufficiently both insisted upon and theoretically naive as to ultimately yield hegemony to the HBDers by sheer inertia: once you have eliminated and salted the earth of any thinking which fails to embrace the most childish physical-scientistic reductionism, then when your rules for thinking enter the arena of politics (especially American politics) and human biology, you have already ceded all possible theoretical ground to HBD, and any counter-weight you try to introduce thereto becomes the pathetic mewling of Kahnemanian irrational beliefs. Your rhetoric already implied “it’s just basic biology” from the very beginning.

So, for anyone keeping score, the only way for anyone on LessWrong to win the rhetorical argument is, unfortunately, just to be normal, and violate one or more of the LessWrong standards for thinking.

It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.

These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.

Identical experience. Goddamnit kid just get drunk and write a bad poem