Neoreaction a Basilisk
by Elizabeth Sandifer, Jack Graham · first published 2017
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yeah - I think it's fully explained by a virulent plague of memetic brain worms, and doesn't need a conspiracy. I recommend Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer to get a handle on it (and not just because my name's in the first sentence).
on “Virgil Griffith arrested over North Korea: engineer arrogance, on the blockchain” ↗Probably the most useful book ever written about topics adjacent to capital-R Rationalism is "Neoreaction, A Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right" [1], by Elizabeth Sandifer. Though the topic of the book is nominally the Alt-Right, a lot more of it is about the capital-R Rationalist communities and individuals…
on “Guess I'm a rationalist now” ↗…http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... ) The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos. (Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)
on “Urbit crowdsale is now live” ↗> I would like to begin by stressing how deeply miserable I am to be back on this beat. [...] Since people seem to love pointing out that Neoreaction a Basilisk does not actually talk about Scott Siskind, aka Scott Alexander, here’s another goddamn essay. The author certainly didn’t owe anyone another article, but it would be nice if there was a point to it…
on “Beigeness, or How to Kill People with Bad Writing: The Scott Alexander Method” ↗…rationalists ever were, Neoreaction and the Basilisk being the biggest. Part of evaluating unusual ideas is that you have to get really good at ignoring bad ones. So when somebody writes a book called "Neoreaction: a Basilisk" and claims that it's about rationality, I make a very simple expected-value calculation.
on “Guess I'm a rationalist now” ↗