ah, i think i misspoke by saying “the community becoming right wing” in my original post. that is a strong overstatement, I’ll correct that.
i agree that rationalists are still very progressive, but i think there’s also been a noticeable but small rightward shift. some examples of what ive noticed outside of reflexive allergy responses to social justice posts:
increasing endorsement/linking of right wing figures like hanania and cremieux
at the same time, increasing… ~culture of silence? around certain controversial left-coded topics, eg what happened with nick decker
increased distrust in the government’s capacity to do things by default, more advocacy of pro-capitalist, free market and libertarian ideals. low confidence but i feel like i can kind of assume that the median rat has libertarian sympathies now in a way that i couldn’t before?
[from another comment i made] scott’s description of the grey tribe characterizes members as like, feeling vaguely annoyance that the issue of gay marriage even comes up, but because of the pronatalism it feels like re-litigation of abortion rights and gay acceptance are beginning to enter the community overton window again. to me, this feels like going further than reflexive anti-wokeism. meanwhile technological solutions seem to be somewhat sidelined[1].
i think a lot of the above examples are quite path dependent and im even sympathetic to some of their developments. im even fine if some would like to make the claim that these are all indicators of the community becoming more well-calibrated in a certain sense. but it does kind of seem like a real rightward trend to me?
i also don’t think this shift will result in significantly more rats voting republican, but that’s because i think voting republican is more of a signal of red tribe belonging than it is of like, actual political belief. one of my good friends from this community is a republican who hasn’t voted red in the presidential elections in ages.
sidelined in the discourse. individual people and organizations loosely affiliated with rationality are doing really cool things around reproductive tech, and this is of course much more important.
increasing endorsement/linking of right wing figures like hanania and cremieux
Idk, back in the day LessWrong had a reasonable amount of discussion of relatively right-wing figures like Moldbug and other neoreactionaries, or on the less extreme end, people like Bryan Caplan. And there’s always been an undercurrent of discussion of e.g. race and IQ.
low confidence but i feel like i can kind of assume that the median rat has libertarian sympathies now in a way that i couldn’t before?
I feel like the median rat had strong libertarian sympathies 10 years ago.
I think that shifting from 15% to 20% over ten years is so plausible under the null hypothesis that it doesn’t really cry out for explanation, and any proposed explanation has to somehow explain why it didn’t lead to a larger effect!
ah, i think i misspoke by saying “the community becoming right wing” in my original post. that is a strong overstatement, I’ll correct that.
i agree that rationalists are still very progressive, but i think there’s also been a noticeable but small rightward shift. some examples of what ive noticed outside of reflexive allergy responses to social justice posts:
increasing endorsement/linking of right wing figures like hanania and cremieux
at the same time, increasing… ~culture of silence? around certain controversial left-coded topics, eg what happened with nick decker
increased distrust in the government’s capacity to do things by default, more advocacy of pro-capitalist, free market and libertarian ideals. low confidence but i feel like i can kind of assume that the median rat has libertarian sympathies now in a way that i couldn’t before?
[from another comment i made] scott’s description of the grey tribe characterizes members as like, feeling vaguely annoyance that the issue of gay marriage even comes up, but because of the pronatalism it feels like re-litigation of abortion rights and gay acceptance are beginning to enter the community overton window again. to me, this feels like going further than reflexive anti-wokeism. meanwhile technological solutions seem to be somewhat sidelined[1].
i think a lot of the above examples are quite path dependent and im even sympathetic to some of their developments. im even fine if some would like to make the claim that these are all indicators of the community becoming more well-calibrated in a certain sense. but it does kind of seem like a real rightward trend to me?
i also don’t think this shift will result in significantly more rats voting republican, but that’s because i think voting republican is more of a signal of red tribe belonging than it is of like, actual political belief. one of my good friends from this community is a republican who hasn’t voted red in the presidential elections in ages.
sidelined in the discourse. individual people and organizations loosely affiliated with rationality are doing really cool things around reproductive tech, and this is of course much more important.
Idk, back in the day LessWrong had a reasonable amount of discussion of relatively right-wing figures like Moldbug and other neoreactionaries, or on the less extreme end, people like Bryan Caplan. And there’s always been an undercurrent of discussion of e.g. race and IQ.
I feel like the median rat had strong libertarian sympathies 10 years ago.
i think these facts can be consistent with a theory like, the rationalists went from being 15% right wing to 20% right wing in the last ten years?
I think that shifting from 15% to 20% over ten years is so plausible under the null hypothesis that it doesn’t really cry out for explanation, and any proposed explanation has to somehow explain why it didn’t lead to a larger effect!
Every so often I stumble across a question in need of a survey, and as it happens I have one.
(Smaller response rate than I’d like though, I should try that chart on the ACX survey sometime.)