There is also an overlap between neoreactionaries and the LW crowd. So?
There’s only a few percent neoreactionaries and I have yet to hear that people are seriously considered whether to run a neoreactionary or an LW meetup.
Specifically, according to the 2013 survey, 2.4% of LW identifies as neoreactionary, while 28.6% identifies as effective altruist. The “reactionary” option is buried in a second-tier politics question, so I suspect it’s underrepresenting LWers with neoreactionary sympathies, but I’d still be surprised if we were looking at more than single digits.
Specifically, according to the 2013 survey, 2.4% of LW identifies as neoreactionary,
Admittedly, I’d bet this is higher than the rate among the general population, if only because LW-ers are more likely to have heard of obscure ideologies at all.
Probably. LW wasn’t where I met my first neoreactionary, but it was where I met my second through my fifth.
It also draws on a similar demographic: disaffected mostly-young mostly-nerds with a distrust of conventional academia and a willingness to try unusual things to solve problems.
In defense of distrusting conventional academia, I currently work in conventional academia, and it has plenty of genuine problems above and beyond the mere fact that someone on the internet might have some hurt feelings about not fitting in at graduate school (or some secret long-held resentment about taking a lucrative industry job instead of martyring themselves to the idol of Intellect by… going to grad-school).
I still trust a replicated scientific study more than most other things, but I don’t necessarily trust academia anymore to have done the right studies in the first place, and I have to remind myself that studies can only allocate belief-mass between currently salient hypotheses.
So, getting back to the original issue, does it look reasonable to “rebrand a movement” if somewhat less than a third of it identifies itself with a new brand?
Wasn’t trying to stake out a claim there. Since you ask, though, I’d expect under half of LW contributors to identity as rationalists in the sense of belonging to a movement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those people were also more likely to identify as effective altruists.
The survey unfortunately doesn’t give us the tools to prove this directly, but we probably could correlate between meetup attendance and EA identification.
We are speaking about effective altruism not altruism in general.
In practice there seems to be quite an overlap between the EA and the LW crowd and there are people deciding whether to hold EA or LW meetups.
Just because there’s an overlap doesn’t mean that LW should be rebranded as EA.
Effective altruism is a subtype of altruism.
There is also an overlap between neoreactionaries and the LW crowd. So?
There’s only a few percent neoreactionaries and I have yet to hear that people are seriously considered whether to run a neoreactionary or an LW meetup.
Specifically, according to the 2013 survey, 2.4% of LW identifies as neoreactionary, while 28.6% identifies as effective altruist. The “reactionary” option is buried in a second-tier politics question, so I suspect it’s underrepresenting LWers with neoreactionary sympathies, but I’d still be surprised if we were looking at more than single digits.
Admittedly, I’d bet this is higher than the rate among the general population, if only because LW-ers are more likely to have heard of obscure ideologies at all.
Probably. LW wasn’t where I met my first neoreactionary, but it was where I met my second through my fifth.
It also draws on a similar demographic: disaffected mostly-young mostly-nerds with a distrust of conventional academia and a willingness to try unusual things to solve problems.
In defense of distrusting conventional academia, I currently work in conventional academia, and it has plenty of genuine problems above and beyond the mere fact that someone on the internet might have some hurt feelings about not fitting in at graduate school (or some secret long-held resentment about taking a lucrative industry job instead of martyring themselves to the idol of Intellect by… going to grad-school).
I still trust a replicated scientific study more than most other things, but I don’t necessarily trust academia anymore to have done the right studies in the first place, and I have to remind myself that studies can only allocate belief-mass between currently salient hypotheses.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I am after all such a mostly-young mostly-nerd.
You seemed be saying that conventional academia doesn’t do well by absolute standards, but that doesn’t mean anyone else is doing better relatively.
Well yes, and that makes sense: conventional academia is one of the only organized efforts to do well at all.
So, getting back to the original issue, does it look reasonable to “rebrand a movement” if somewhat less than a third of it identifies itself with a new brand?
Wasn’t trying to stake out a claim there. Since you ask, though, I’d expect under half of LW contributors to identity as rationalists in the sense of belonging to a movement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those people were also more likely to identify as effective altruists.
The survey unfortunately doesn’t give us the tools to prove this directly, but we probably could correlate between meetup attendance and EA identification.
A good point. And speaking of, why did this whole idea of LW being a “movement” pop up?
LW is a movement like Something Awful is a movement. At least the Goonies used to be able to whistle up large fleets in Eve… X-D
I imagine the Craft and the Community sequence has something to do with it.
The whole point of rebranding is that normally before you rebrand nobody identifies with the new brand.