(2020-07-10) Slate Star Codex And Silicon Valley's War Against The Media

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Slate-Star Codex (Scott Alexander) and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

In the past seven years, S.S.C. has become perhaps the premier public-facing venue of the “rationalist” community

one might credit him with two crowning contributions. First, he has been instrumental in the evolution of the community’s self-image, helping to shape its members’ understanding of themselves not as merely a collection of individuals with shared interests and beliefs but as a mature subculture, one with its own jargon, inside jokes, and pantheon of heroes. Second, he more than anyone has defined and attempted to enforce the social norms of the subculture, insisting that they distinguish themselves not only on the basis of data-driven argument and logical clarity but through an almost fastidious commitment to civil discourse.

Alexander’s appeal elicited an instant reaction from members of the local intelligentsia in Silicon Valley and its satellite principalities. Within a few days, a petition collected more than six thousand signatories

Balaji Srinivasan turned to address Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs, and C.E.O.s: “The New York Times tried to doxx Scott Alexander for clicks. Just unsubscribing won’t change much. They can afford it. What will is freezing them out. By RTing #ghostnyt you commit to not talking to NYT reporters or giving them quotes. Go direct if you have something to say.”

The proliferation of such elaborate conjectures was hardly commensurate with the vision of Slate Star Codex as a touchstone of patience and disinterest.

Until recently, I was a writer for the Times Magazine, and the idea that anyone on the organization’s masthead would direct a reporter to take down a niche blogger because he didn’t like paywalls, or he promoted a petition about a professor, or, really, for any other reason, is ludicrous

As Eric Weinstein, a podcast host and managing director at Peter Thiel’s investment firm, tweeted, “I believe that activism has taken over.” Here was the first great salvo in a new front in the culture wars.

What would eventually become the rationalist community had its distant origins in the futurist Listservs of the very early Internet era. But it took shape as an identifiable movement on a blog called LessWrong, which was created in 2009 and maintained by a machine-intelligence researcher and former Orthodox Jew named Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In “The AI Does Not Hate You,” an excellent overview of rationalist history and debate, the British journalist Tom Chivers notes with an avuncular warmth that most rationalists seem constitutionally incapable of ordinary small talk. They do, however, have a tendency to make any idle assertion into the subject of a proposition bet,

Alexander began as a contributor to LessWrong, and the center of rationalist gravity followed him, in 2013, to Slate Star Codex.

Many rationalist exchanges involve lively if donnish arguments about abstruse thought experiments

A minority address issues that are contentious and at times offensive. These conversations, about race and genetic or biological differences between the sexes, have rightfully drawn criticism from outsiders.

Alexander has long fretted over the likelihood that the presence of these fringe figures could tarnish the reputation of the blog and its community. In late 2013, he published “The Anti-Reactionary FAQ,” a thirty-thousand-word post now regarded as one of his first major contributions to the rationalist canon.

One of Alexander’s particularly controversial posts, written shortly after Donald Trump’s election, took up the question of whether it was accurate to call the President’s racism “overt.”

In 2017, Alexander identified himself as a member of the “hereditarian left,” defined as the ability to believe, on the one hand, that genetic differences play a determining role in human affairs and, on the other, that we ought to act as though they don’t.

The mind-set of logical serenity, for all of the rationalists’ talk of “skin in the game” and their inclination to heighten every argument with a proposition bet, only obtains as long as their discussions feel safely confined to the realm of what they regard, consciously or otherwise, as sport.

Since the 2016 Presidential election, a contingent of the media has been increasingly critical of Silicon Valley, charging tech founders, C.E.O.s, venture capitalists, and other technology boosters with an arrogant, naïve, and reckless attitude toward the institutions of a functional democracy, noting their tendency to disguise anticompetitive, extractive behavior as disruptive innovation. Many technologists and their investors believe that media coverage of their domain has become histrionic and punitive, scapegoating tech companies for their inability to solve extremely difficult problems, such as political polarization, that are neither of their own devising nor within their ability to solve.

By then, six months after the election, Alexander had emerged as one of the keenest observers of technologists as a full-fledged social cadre, and of their sharpening class antagonism with an older order—the institutions in New York, Boston, D.C., and Los Angeles that Balaji Srinivasan has disparaged as “the Paper Belt.”

This new group, Alexander suggested in an earlier beloved essay, “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup,” published in 2014, sits at an odd angle to America’s extant tensions.

He introduces the idea of a third cohort in an aside: “(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe

but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time.)”

The issue of the Gray Lady against the Gray Tribe, like so many conflicts that have recently played out on social media, is perhaps best viewed as an internecine struggle over the strategies of the Blue Tribe in an era of political crisis and despair. Everyone has skin in the game, and the stakes are high.