> I especially liked the existential threat of Cade Metz.
I am perpetually fascinated by the way rationalists love to dismiss critics by pointing out that they met some people in person and they seemed nice.
It's such a bizarre meme.
Curtis Yarvin went to one of the "Vibecamp" rationalist gatherings, was nice to some prominent Twitter rationalists, and now they are ardent defenders of him on Twitter. Their entire argument is "I met him and he was nice".
It's mind boggling that the rationalist part of their philosophy goes out the window as soon as the lines are drawn between in-group and out-group.
Bringing up Cade Metz is a perennial favorite signal because of how effectively they turned it into a "you're either with us or against us" battle, completely ignoring any valid arguments Cade Metz may have been brought to the table. Then you look at how they treat Neoreactionaries and how we're supposed to look past our disdain for them and focus on the possible good things in their arguments, and you realize maybe this entire movement isn't really about truth-seeking as much as they think it is.
Tricky to do without giving you an archive link of a post with his last name on it, which I'm disinclined to do. Here, in this community, with this community's norms, I'm happy to oblige him. But here is not the real world.
Come on; Scott Alexander Siskind now has his real name published in New York Times, RationalWiki, and Wikipedia, since early 2021. You can find this all on the first page of Google results (exactly as he predicted). He even mentioned his name in the first article on his Substack blog, but then returned to the pen name his readers are more familiar with.
And he has already lost the job he was trying to protect back then. Now AFAIK his main source of income are subscriptions on Substack, and obviously those are not threatened in any way by having his name mentioned one more time.
Please let's respect each other's intelligence by not playing the game of pretending that posting Scott's full name before 2021 is the same as posting Scott's full name after 2021.
So, do you have examples of "some of his best-known posts published under his own name" before 2021?
He had a blog before Slate Star Codex. The impression I have is that I know more about this than you, and I'm not invested in this discussion enough to educate you adversarially, so I think it makes the most sense to just leave this subthread where it lies.
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that Scott did not want to go from a world where his patients Googling his real name did _not_ immediately lead to his blog, to a world where it _did_ immediately lead to his blog, and that was his primary (and valid) objection to having his real first and last name put into print, is baffling.
My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name. I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
> My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name.
Is this anything other than a naked assertion of force, that might makes right? He couldn't stop it, therefore it's fine that it happened to him? (Also, it's extremely... something... to describe "he asked a journalist to not print his name on the front page of the NYT" as "asking the world to forget his name", as if his real name was already the primary referrent by which he wielded his influence, and he wanted to shield that power from scrutiny. This was obviously not the case, and is _still_ not the case despite the article, which is why nobody has actually made a compelling argument for why including his name in the article was _good_ rather than _something Cade Metz had the power to do_. I in fact don't particularly think that Cade Metz did it to deliberately hurt Scott, I just think he's a blankface who didn't care that his usual modus operandi would sometimes hurt people for no good reason and was unable to step out of his frame enough to actually check whether what he was doing made any sense, in that instance.)
> I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
That you describe it as "patients must not be able to Google your blog" makes me not particularly trust the reports of those therapists. I, too, talked to some therapists, who thought that Scott's concerns were reasonable. Not that there was an overriding professional duty, sure, but that wasn't the claim, either. I dunno, man. The attitude you have towards this really seems like, "well, getting slapped isn't that bad, and you're not strong enough to stop him... maybe stop complaining?" What good thing happened when Cade Metz put his name in print? If you want to adopt a principled stance against pseudonymous writing online, do that. But don't pretend that Scott's failure to keep a pristine separation between his real name and his entire history of online writing somehow makes it so that the NYT printing his name is merely the maintaining the status quo ("ask the world to forget his name"), rather than dramatically expanding the circle of people for whom his identity was deanonymized.
If it's an assertion of force, it's by Scott against the reporter, who needed only Google to find Scott's name. People don't get to demand that reporters un-know common knowledge just because publicity is unwelcome.
His reaction to this incident as being a sort of targeted hit piece towards him specifically was utter paranoid nonsense and just really made him look full of shit from an outside perspective. Further, authors of the piece received countless death threats from a mob of angry redditors with no real insight other than "someone got doxxed?!?! HOW DARE THEY!!!" (a narrative which I personally fell victim to before reading the actual article). Scott did nothing to remedy this situation and perhaps even fanned the flames a good deal.
More people should read the article, if anything because it provides interesting insight into Sam Altman's shady behavior.
Have you ever had random people harass you and threaten violence towards you in heavy numbers? No amount of resolve will keep that from being a deeply stressful situation.
I am perpetually fascinated by the way rationalists love to dismiss critics by pointing out that they met some people in person and they seemed nice.
It's such a bizarre meme.
Curtis Yarvin went to one of the "Vibecamp" rationalist gatherings, was nice to some prominent Twitter rationalists, and now they are ardent defenders of him on Twitter. Their entire argument is "I met him and he was nice".
It's mind boggling that the rationalist part of their philosophy goes out the window as soon as the lines are drawn between in-group and out-group.
Bringing up Cade Metz is a perennial favorite signal because of how effectively they turned it into a "you're either with us or against us" battle, completely ignoring any valid arguments Cade Metz may have been brought to the table. Then you look at how they treat Neoreactionaries and how we're supposed to look past our disdain for them and focus on the possible good things in their arguments, and you realize maybe this entire movement isn't really about truth-seeking as much as they think it is.